


What's Past Is Prologue

by gakorogirl, Tmae



Series: Teen Leaguers [1]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: (in this case without), Alternate Universe, Gen, because they'd be heroes with or without their mentors, none of the adults have their origin stories, that did absolutely nothing to stop the kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-02 05:25:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8652643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gakorogirl/pseuds/gakorogirl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tmae/pseuds/Tmae
Summary: Somewhere in the multiverse, there is an Earth where Thomas and Martha Wayne never died. An Earth where Diana never left Themyscira. An earth where Kal-El's pod got knocked off course and into the Phantom Zone.An Earth where J'onn J'onzz remains on Mars, has never left her surface, where Barry Allen was never struck by lightning, where Orin remains in Atlantis and does not venture to the surface, where Abin Sur yet defends Sector 2814 and thus Hal Jordan has never flown among the stars.
An earth with no Batman, no Wonder Woman, no Superman. An Earth without the Martian Manhunter, the Flash, Aquaman or an earthen Green Lantern.
Though these things are, the Justice League yet comes to be.





	1. But A Child of Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For, long ago, the truth to say,  
> He has grown up and gone away,  
> And it is but a child of air  
> That lingers in the garden there.
> 
> Kara Zor-El and her baby cousin are rushed into escape pods as Krypton crumbles. One of them makes it, crashing into a cornfield in Kansas. And then everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This series has been in development for months, I'm so happy to finally start posting chapters! As a quick overview of how this is going to work, we'll be posting an origin story every Saturday until all of them are up. 
> 
> After origin stories comes a new fic in the series to deal with the actual formation of the League.
> 
> The title of this chapter is from _To Any Reader_ by Robert Louis Stevenson.

She is holding her baby cousin and telling him about the constellations when it happens, the first tremors in the rock and the fire bursting from the ground. Krypton is falling.

Kara shudders as her parents pull her through the falling city, watching the spires turn to ash as they collapse. “You and Kal are going to a planet called _Earth,”_ her mother is saying in a warm, calming voice as Kara climbs into an escape pod with numb hands. She’s shaking so hard she almost falls back onto the ground, until her father reaches out to help her in. “The radiation of the yellow sun will give you powers. You’ll be able to fly.”

Kara tries to imagine a yellow sun, smaller and brighter than Rao. She thinks of the strange new world where she’ll have to live. She thinks of flying.

She starts to cry.

“Why can’t you come with me?” she asks, her voice choked by sobs.

“The pod wouldn’t be able to support all of us. You’ll have to find Kal once you get to Earth, and help him grow up. You’ll be able to find kind people there-”

And the pod seals shut and Kara only gets a last moment of consciousness, giving in to panic and desperately beating her palms against the cold glass, before it forces her into stasis. She never sees Krypton explode.

*****

It’s funny how the multiverse works. In almost every universe, Kal-El the last son of Krypton makes it to Earth right on time. In most universes, Kara Zor-El is trapped in the Phantom Zone for years before finally reaching her destination.

But in this one, the force of Krypton’s explosion throws baby Kal into the Phantom Zone, and Kara keeps on going. Her pod lands in a field in Kansas, and after the onboard computer runs a diagnostic and confirms that it’s reached the right planet, it awakens its occupant from stasis. Kara blinks up at the glass overhead, pressing her palms to the smooth surface still hot from reentry. The top of the pod slides open with a quiet _hiss,_ and Kara hesitates before climbing out into the cool summer night.

It’s nighttime here, and the stars are shining brightly down on her. Long blades of some kind of grain sway around her, higher than her head, and she runs her fingers along the prickly stalks. In the soft, pale light, they look like they’ve been dipped in silver. Some kind of animal is making a high, metallic chirping noise, and tiny golden lights flicker in the grain around her.

Upon investigating, Kara sees that the lights are tiny animals with wings and bright red heads, whose bodies flash golden when they fly. One of them crawls along her hand, tapping her skin with inquisitive antennae, and she touches it with a tentative finger. It flies away, blinking brightly until she loses sight of it among the stars.

This planet has a single moon, a small round moon that glows pearly white. The moonlight feels soft on Kara’s skin, and as she tilts her head up she feels much stronger and clearheaded. She needs to find someone who can help her, who can find her shelter and help her figure out where Kal landed.

She stands on the tips of her toes to look over the grain and sees a small house in the distance, and starts to make her way through the field towards it.

Once she makes it out of the field, she climbs up the steps- rickety and made of wood- and stands in front of the door, shifting her weight from foot to foot. A light overhead flickers, drawing the attention of many small insects that beat their wings against the bulb. Kara reaches out and opens the outer door, made of a ripped metal screen, and raps on the inner door.

It’s answered a little later by a kindly-looking woman with greying hair and a pointed face. She says something friendly, reaching out to Kara. “My name is Kara Zor-El,” says Kara hesitantly, and immediately feels like an idiot when the woman frowns in confusion. She can’t speak their language, only Kryptonian, so instead she reaches out and catches the edge of the woman’s sleeve and pulls her outside, drawing her to the crashed escape pod.

There is a man, too, with hair likewise starting to turn grey and gentle eyes. They follow her into the field, and she shows them the escape pod. Its sides still shimmer with heat, and a holographic display pops up as Kara passes her hands over it, flickering into static every few seconds but still more or less functional.

They repeat a word over and over again, gesturing towards her when they say it. _Alien._

Kara taps her chest. “Kara Zor-El,” she says, hoping they’ll understand her. “Kara.” And they mirror the gesture, smiling nervous but kind smiles.

“Martha Kent.”

“Jonathan Kent.”

Kara looks around, slowly realizing she doesn’t know what to do next, what to say to these people. If she spoke the same language, she might ask if she could spend the night with them before leaving to search for Kal-El. She stifles a yawn, staggering a little and falling against the warm metal side of the escape pod. The two Earth people coo softly at her, and the man picks her up and carries her back to the house. Halfway asleep, she is vaguely aware of lying down on something soft, and blankets being placed over her.

*****

When Kara wakes up, she is floating. She gasps, tumbling to the wooden floor in a tangle of blankets, and looks up. The room is full of a brilliant golden light that makes her eyes ache, and when she looks out the window she sees a pale blue sky and a burning yellow-white sun. She closes her eyes, covering them with her hands to block out the light as she feels herself drifting off the floor again. The light is warm, and impossibly bright, and it tingles and almost burns where it touches her skin.

Martha Kent calls out from the other side of the closed door, her voice concerned. “Kara? Is everything okay?”

“Okay,” replies Kara awkwardly, the unfamiliar word heavy on her tongue. “Is...okay.” She takes a deep breath and pictures herself moving towards the ground, and she sinks until her feet are on the floor again. She can smell food, and she cautiously reaches for the doorknob. The nervous tension in her fingers crushes the metal, and she jerks back, staring at her small hand in surprise before gingerly opening the door with the tips of her fingers. The metal is not damaged any further as she turns the half-crushed knob. _Hopefully I can learn to control this,_ she thinks.

“Good morning,” says Martha warmly.

“Good?”

“Good morning,” she repeats, and then a flurry of words that Kara only catches a little of- _Jonathan,_ and _alien,_ and _Kara-_ but she can still smell food, and she ventures into the warm food-preparing-room and looks around. Every room in the house is flooded with the light of the yellow star, and she can feel it flowing through her like liquid gold. It does not burn now, instead it feels rich and warm and comforting. Kara tilts her head up into a shaft of light and closes her eyes.

“Glad you woke up for breakfast,” says Jonathan.

Breakfast is a word that Martha used earlier. Kara understands that it is the name for the morning meal. _Breakfast._ Her brain is faster now, faster than fast, learning, changing. Soon enough, she will pick up more words, be able to string them into clumsy sentences.

“Breakfast,” she says, and smiles. She’s very hungry, ravenous in fact. _Maybe it has something to do with being in stasis for so long. Or maybe the yellow sunlight._

There are bread rolls with white sugar melted on them (they’re called _cinnamon rolls_ , Kara learns quickly) and strips of fatty meat that’s crisp at the edges (which is _bacon_ ) and something that Kara does recognize, sort of, as a fried vegetable. They’re called _potatoes._ They taste a little like, but not quite the same as, the plants that grew back at home. Everything is strange here, even the things that could almost be comforting, and Kara starts to tear up.

The Kents hurry to reassure her- _okay,_ they repeat, and Kara wipes the tears from her eyes with the back of her sleeve and smiles bravely and tells them she is _okay._ She shoves another slice of bacon into her mouth and stands up and walks outside onto the porch, drinking in the strange summer-smelling wind and the golden sunshine. She spreads her arms and throws back her head and rises into the sky, up and up and up until the light burns her skin and she swoops down, tumbling head over heels into a field.

She bounces across the ground, skidding a few feet and landing on her side with her arms and legs tangled underneath her. The impact should have hurt her, but it didn’t. She’s dirty, but not even scratched. She can hear everything around her, animals chirping in the trees and burrowing in the ground and vehicles roaring along a road on the horizon. She thinks if she concentrated enough she could hear the corn growing.

She is a little afraid of herself.

*****

Nobody asks where the Kents found their new daughter, a bright young girl around seven or eight years old, but everyone wonders. And then as the months wear on, and little Kara Kent becomes a permanent feature in Smallville, they stop wondering so much. Kara is kind and bold but a little bit airheaded, and she rarely laughs but she’s always smiling.

“She’s adopted,” says Martha calmly, watching Kara swing back and forth on the playground with her honey-gold hair blowing around her. Sometimes she seems to hang in midair for just a second longer than she should, but aside from a brief double-take by one or two adults, nobody really notices.

Kara grows up drinking in fairytales like water, stories of heroes and hope. She’s always liked legends, Nightwing and Flamebird and Cythonna and Vohc. Earth’s mythologies tell the same stories in different words, and she wonders if every planet is the same in this way. It is some small measure of familiarity, and the words feel like home. This time, the taste of home does not make her cry, but it opens something hungry and aching and impossibly sad in her chest.

Nearly two years after her landing on Earth, she saves two boys who are a few years younger than she is as she walks to the library. A car is careening towards them, brakes broken, and she shoots forwards quicker than quick and grabs both of them and pulls them out of the way. Her feet don’t quite touch the ground, and she tumbles onto her back as she lands to keep the boys from being scratched.

“Kara?” asks the older of the two, all of six years old. He wraps his arms around his little brother. “You saved us! How did you-”

“I was passing by,” says Kara. “I saw the car coming and I tackled you out of the way, I guess.” She shrugs uncomfortably, and both boys seem to believe her small lies. (After all, what else would they believe? Kara Kent, kind and a little silly, who climbs up trees to find missing cats and sells bright pink lemonade and popsicles for charity and had to repeat a grade, can _fly_ ? Can lift two boys as if they weighed no more than feathers? Nobody would ever believe that _._ It’s what keeps her safe.)

*****

Kara is at the soda fountain on the north end of Main Street with a few kids from school, just about three years after landing on Earth, when it happens. The news is suddenly interrupted by a report of a bombing in Metropolis, and Kara remembers the crumbling buildings of Argo and the way the people screamed as the ground turned molten, and she flies faster than she’s ever flown before, northeast to Metropolis. As she soars overhead, the city takes her breath away, the sunlight glimmering on water and glass and the lights and the color. It reminds her of Krypton, a little- at least, it is more familiar than the towns and endless fields of Kansas.

She lands on the street so hard that the pavement splinters, and she begins to ferry survivors out of the smouldering wreckage, tilting her head to listen for heartbeats buried in the rubble. She lifts a fallen beam into the air, revealing a small boy curled in an air pocket within the tumble of rock and metal. “Hello,” she says, and holds out her hands with a warm smile. The child blinks at the flying girl, sunlight behind her making a radiant halo around her face and arms, and she scoops him up and carries him out onto the street.

The ones who saw her that day say she was an angel, with her golden hair aflame and her eyes like dancing lightning, and she walked through the fire and came out unharmed. They say she lifted a whole building to free children trapped underneath, and she blew the fires out with breath as cold as the arctic wind, and she waved her hand and the rain came down to drown out the flame.

Only some of this is true, of course, but the way people tell it you’d think they were announcing that the sky is blue. It’s a simple fact, the Supergirl is all-powerful and all-wonderful and her eyes shine like pale and dazzling stars.

It was young reporter Lois Lane at the _Daily Planet_ who decided to call her Supergirl, and it stuck. Soon, Supergirl is seen all over the globe, and wherever she goes heads turn and the rumors follow, that she is radiant as the sun, powerful as a supernova and with a smile a thousand times as bright. The sign of the House of El is painted red on her chest, but they say it stands for Strength and Spirit and _Supergirl._ They say her footprints make craters in the ground, they say she draws the line of Right and Wrong in burning light and did you know she’ll tell no lies, and she’s as quick as an arrow, and-

 _Truth and Justice and the American Way,_ they say, and the one thing they never say is that she is only a child, carrying the world in her too-small hands.

*****

She loves Metropolis, and the business and the constant low hum of people make her think of home. Metropolis welcomes her readily, proclaims itself the city of the Supergirl. Tourists wear merchandise that Kara doesn’t quite know how to react to- but in the end, the House of El is gone, and the only memory of it is a child stranded on a world that is not her own, a baby lost somewhere in space, and the symbol that looks much like the Earth letter _S_ emblazoned on a hundred thousand t-shirts and baseball caps. So it doesn’t really matter, in the end.

The tallest building in the city is the Lexcorp tower, and the walls are all made of mirrored glass to look down over the city without being seen. Lex Luthor does many things without being seen, chief among them keeping track of the activities of the planet’s new golden girl. He is among the few people in Metropolis who realizes just how young Kara truly is, freckled and snub-nosed with blue eyes that do not shine anything like burning stars or lightning, but twinkle bright and friendly and childlike.

He doesn’t particularly care.

She is dangerous, not in the way of an angel of death but in the easy reckless way of a child who has no idea of the power she holds. Nothing harms her, not even electricity or sonic attacks (he’s tried both, put advanced weaponry in the hands of a few terrorist cells to test his theories. Nothing works.)

And then an incident occurs in which Supergirl suddenly collapses in a museum exhibit during a press conference after she comes too close to the contents of a display case showcasing minerals fallen to Earth from deep space. A brief investigation isolates the mineral, a small green rock that glows softly when exposed to the light of a yellow sun.

It’s good insurance, for now, and he wears it close to his skin as he continues his work. He sends out expeditions to recover more of the mineral, and begins to systematically search museum displays and back rooms.

He names it _Kryptonite._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final notes:
> 
> One of Clark's abilities is learning languages at accelerated speeds, so as Kara becomes exposed to yellow sunlight she picks up English faster. I didn't have time to write a full account of Lex Luthor's discovery of Kryptonite but I'm DCAU trash so I went with a shortened version of the events in Superman: The Animated Series. (The specific episode is _A Little Piece of Home,_ I think.)
> 
> Listen to Kara's character playlist [here!](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLChG03wJV-nh2RbYAwrRyvxkTi2YgGHyO)


	2. 'Til The Moon Has Taken Flight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Til the moon has taken flight;  
> To and fro we leap  
> And chase the frothy bubbles,  
> While the world is full of troubles  
> And anxious in its sleep.
> 
> With the Lasso of Truth at her side and indistructable gauntlets on her wrists, a child raised among the Amazons leaves Themyscira and protects Man's World. Her name is not Diana.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so arrives chapter two!
> 
> As an addition to last week's overview of "an origin story every Saturday", I feel I should mention that my lovely co-author and I are also alternating chapters! She wrote last week's chapter, I wrote this one, next week will be hers, and so on. No spoilers as to which of the characters we've each written, though. You'll just have to wait and see to find that out.
> 
> This chapter's title & the summary excerpt are from W. B. Yeats's _The Stolen Child!_

The only thing louder than the child’s screaming is the roar of the flames surrounding her.

There is a woman lying on the floor. Dead, though whether by the smoke or the flames is difficult to tell. There are walls and roofs caved in, rubble lying all around. And the fire flares ever higher, blocking every exit that a toddler could feasibly find to escape through.

All the little girl trapped in the centre of it all knows is that she’s alone, it’s far, far too hot, and she’s _scared._

So she screams, and she screams, and she _screams._

But for all that she uses every scrap of strength her little body has, her screams aren’t loud enough. Nobody can hear her. Nobody comes.

And then somebody _does._

The door is knocked free from its frame as though kicked down and a cool breeze pushes through the flames, curling carefully around the child and shielding her from the heat. Strong, _safe_ arms scoop her up and her screams hiccup and stop as the roaring of the flames is drowned out by a soft, reassuring voice murmuring to her.

And then she is whisked far, far away from the fire and its ability to hurt her.

* * *

Her life is _good._ It is safe and happy and wonderful. She runs across the grasses and marvels at the skies and dives to the deepest depths, learns wonderful things, has incredible adventures, and she does it all alongside those she considers her siblings.

And then, she is ten years old, and so are they, and all their lives are changed.

They are to be sent back to their homeworlds, back to the places where they were all first snatched from the jaws of death, back to the places none of them truly _know_ , for New Cronus is _home_ and always has been for as long as they can remember.

They are to be sent back to their homeworlds and they are to _forget._ Everything here, everything they have experience, everything about _each other_.

The Titans say that they may remember, can come _home_ , when they are adults, when they are ready, when they have lived long enough among people that they will not repeat the same mistakes of the past.

This is little comfort to any ten year old being told they must leave everything they have ever known.

She feels a hand slip into her own and hold it tight.

“I will miss you, Troy,” says a voice currently as familiar as her own.

“And I will miss you,” she says, trying not to think about how soon, those standing next to her will be no more familiar than strangers.

The Titans think that this is important, and they have never been anything but loving and kind so long as they have been here, so she squares her shoulders, grits her teeth, and bears the loss bravely even as tears run freely down her face.

* * *

Troy and her siblings were meant to save the Titans of Myth and, though nobody quite noticed, they started doing that long before the Titans believed they would. In quiet ways, in subtle ways, through the way of simply being _children_. The Titans raised them, and loved them, and through that love started to come a little closer to that goal of not thinking of themselves as above others that they would later seek to see instilled in their children by sending them back to their homes.

And so, when the time comes that each of the Titan Seeds are sent back to their planets of origin, each of them is sent with a gift, where in another universe they would have gone with nothing. Each one is personal, created for that child, something of home that they can carry when they do not know where home is any more, and each one is crafted to match the level of development on their planets, such that they cannot be used in a way that would trigger their memories too early, prevent them fulfilling the goal with which they were sent home.

In another world, the young girl known as Troy would have been sent, alone and with nothing, to such a place on her homeworld of Earth that she would join up with the newly forming Teen Titans, where she would find friends and family and safety.

In this world, there are no Teen Titans, no Justice League to have preceded them, not even a Justice Society to have preceded _them._ There are no heroes for her to be sent to for safety.

So she is sent somewhere else.

* * *

She wakes to the feel of soft sand against her skin and cold waves lapping at her skin and something light covering her. She pushes herself up onto her knees, almost missing the slight _fwush_ sound of fabric sliding off a surface. She reaches behind her, and bunches her hands in material, pulling it forward into her lap. Almost big enough to cover her entire body, it looks almost as though someone turned the night sky into a blanket.

She looks up at an unfamiliar bright, blue, daytime sky, white clouds drifting across it, hears the calls of unfamiliar birds, and feels her eyes start to sting.

The cries are silent at first, and then grow into body-shaking, hiccupping sobs. The tears fall quickly and heavily onto the already wet sand, mingling quickly and almost unnoticeably into the seawater. It feels like there is a great empty space inside of her, something missing that should be there but _isn’t_ , but she doesn’t know what it is and-

She wants to go _home._

She doesn’t know where home _is._

Her memories feel big and blank and _empty._ She remembers heat and fire and screaming and someone carrying her away to safety and then… nothing. Or, no, not nothing, but nothing _substantial_. She knows who she is, has impressions of things, but where she came from, where is home, who are her family… it’s blank. It’s all blank.

Her hands clench into fists, one around the fabric still in her lap, and then she pushes herself up onto her feet. Her feet sink into the sand somewhat but finding her footing is easy regardless. She looks around herself, sees ocean to one side, long, stretching beach ahead, and long beach that fades to a grassy incline to her other side. She needs to find people, that much feels clear. She needs to find people and people will help her. Heading for the grass seems like a good idea for that.

There is a _shuff_ of displaced sand and the realisation that _I didn’t look_ **_behind_ ** _myself._

The child known as Troy turns around.

The amazon known as Diana meets her eyes, and smiles, and holds out her hand, though she isn’t quite close enough for the child to reach it without stepping forward.

“Hello,” Diana says.

“Hi,” Troy says, one sand coated hand reaching up to clutch at the fabric of her tunic, the other hanging loosely with the star blanket half lying against the sand, shivering slightly “…do you know where I am?”

* * *

Diana takes her to the other amazons and they help her clean off all the sand and dry off and give her something warm to drink. Troy has her star blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and keeping it there while holding the mug is a little tricky. A brief thought about it being handy if the blanket stayed up on its own flits through her mind, and then she feels fabric shift and settle and realises her star blanket is now more of a star poncho.

 _That’s pretty cool_ she thinks. And then she cups the mug in her hands and lets the heat seep through them, sticking close to Diana’s side while the amazons talk.

She hears them say a lot of things like _lost at sea_ and _Thetis_ and _Go Forth._ Apparently she’s not the first child to end up here and they have a system but she’s sort of… weird. Or something. She’s not sure.

The conversation dies down and one of the amazons approaches her. A part of her wants to hide behind Diana’s legs, but a bigger part whispers that she is a _warrior_ and _mustn’t_ so she doesn’t.

“I’m sorry we didn’t ask earlier,” the woman says, crouching down so as to look her in the eye “but, what’s your name?”

“I think it’s Troy,” she says, and then pauses, thinking about it “but that doesn’t… feel right, anymore,”

It doesn’t, it really doesn’t. It feels like she’s missing whatever it is that’s supposed to _make_ her Troy, like Troy is a name for someone very like her who she isn’t right now.

“Then what is your name now?” Diana asks, putting a hand on her shoulder and smiling reassuringly.

She thinks about it, and something that feels like it fits comes to mind.

“Donna,” she says, the warmth in her heart at saying it feeling a little like the warmth in her hands from the hot drink. “Donna Troy,”

* * *

And that is how she comes to live on Themyscira.

She falls into sisterhood quickly and with vigour. Sisterhood feels _right_ , somehow, like something she is meant to be a part of. It feels like maybe there is something else, something that is supposed to go _alongside_ sisterhood, but she doesn’t know what it is and tries to put it out of her mind with all of the other things she feels she should know and doesn’t.

There are a _lot_ of things that she feels like she should know but just _doesn’t._ Things like where she came from and how she got here and who raised her. Things like why she’s as fast and as strong as an Amazonian child would be even though she doesn’t come from Themyscira. Things like why she can be knocked down in a spar and not fall but _float_.

She doesn’t know how or if she will ever find answers for those questions, so she pushes them out of her mind and focuses on just _living_. Living and learning and growing. Spending time with the sisters she now has, not wondering about if she ever had any before. Sitting with Menalippe and being taught about things like the seas and the stars, training with Artemis, hoping one day she’ll manage to beat her, joking and laughing and running with Diana, who found her on the beach and with whom she feels closest.

Maybe, just maybe, if she pushes the things she doesn’t know far enough away often enough, she’ll stop feeling the yearning tug in her heart whenever she looks at the stars or the horizon.

* * *

In the dead of night, soft moonlight turns silver the sands that shine golden in the daytime. The same silvery light ripples across the ocean, which glitters with stars and galaxies reflected across its surface. The waves lap gently across the sand and up around the ankles of bare feet buried in it, their quiet splashing only barely disguising the sound of approaching footsteps.

“This is where I found you, those years ago” Diana says, her voice almost as soft as the moonlight.

“I know,” Donna says, her eyes fixed on the midnight horizon, far, far away “It was only _two_ years ago. I remember,”

Diana steps forward and places a hand on her sister’s shoulder, an anchor to pull her back from wherever her mind is drifting to on the ocean her eyes won’t leave.

“Something is troubling you,” she says.

Donna raises one arm, spread out in front of her, her fingers splayed and palm down, as though she is reaching out for something distant.

“There’s something out there,” she says, her voice quiet but brimming with fire “Something I’m _missing,_ somewhere I’m meant to _be_ , something I’m supposed to _do._ Something that’s… that’s _calling_ to me,”

“Out there?” Diana asks, though they both know what Donna means.

She breathes in deeply, then out, once, twice.

“Man’s World,” Donna says, eyes ever fixed on the horizon “I think… I think I have to go to Man’s World,”

The hand on her shoulder squeezes slightly, a reassurance, not a condemnation.

“Whatever you choose to do,” Diana says “you will always be my sister,”

Donna closes her eyes, unable to pull them from the horizon otherwise, and spins, wrapping her arms around Diana and holding on tightly.

Diana hugs her back, and the only sound is the sound of the waves.

* * *

Donna knows what the consequences will be if she makes this decision. If she leaves, she will never be able to return. The price of choosing the follow the call will be Themyscira, the only home she can remember ever knowing, being beyond her reach forever.

But she aches to follow the call, the thing pulling her towards that horizon, towards Man’s World. Trying to ignore it does nothing. It is in her muscles, in her bones, a feeling of importance pulling her away from here.

She doesn’t want to lose Themyscira. But for all that she loves it and loves everyone on it… Themyscira has never quite felt like how she thinks home should feel. Themyscira feels, and has always felt, temporary.

She knows the choice she has to make. She doesn’t want to make it, but she has to. She knows what her decision is.

“You look troubled, Donna,”

The unexpected words pull her suddenly and sharply out of her thoughts and she startles, turning around sharply to face whoever has approached, scraping her hands against the wall she is leaning on.

“Menalippe,” Donna says, one hand still over her racing heart “you scared me,”

“You must have been truly lost in thought to not hear me coming,” Menalippe says.

Donna sighs and leans back against the wall, this time with her back to the ocean and the horizon behind it, pressing the palms of her hands against it, the star blanket wrapped around her as a cloak shielding them from some of the chill of the stone. A part of her wants to tell Menalippe the decision she is struggling with, like she told Diana, but a larger part _doesn’t._

“I suppose I was,” she says, still feeling the tug in her heart.

Menalippe reaches forward and puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezing in reassurance.

“There is something I need to show you,” she says, smiling softly.

* * *

Menalippe takes her to the council room, which is completely and totally empty.

“Wait here,” Menalippe says, tapping the edge of the table, and then continuing on past it.

Donna stops and waits. Menalippe ducks out of one of the other doors and comes back moments later carrying a cloth bundle in her arms. She sets it down on the table near Donna and taps the top, just once, as though to draw her attention to it.

“Open it,” she says.

Donna reaches forward and gently unfolds the cloth. Her eyes go wide when she sees what lies within. A pair of gauntlets, like those worn by all Amazons, gleaming silver. A sword, bright and polished, that looks the perfect size for her hand. And a length of coiled rope, glowing softly gold.

“I… don’t understand,” she says, almost reaching out a hand but pulling it back at the last second. “Are these…?”

“For you,” Menalippe answers.

Donna makes a sound that might be a question but mostly comes out as confusion.

Menalippe reaches out and takes her hands, crouching down slightly so as to be on eye level. Her smile is still there, but there is a hint of steel and seriousness there now as well.

“You have a destiny, Donna,” she says, making a holding eye contact “A destiny that is calling you even now, one that doesn’t lie here on Themyscira. But,” and here her mouth quirks slightly “I have a feeling you already know that,”

She thinks of the constant tug on her heart, the call pulling her towards the horizon. She nods, throat feeling tight.

“I felt it the day Diana brought you up from the beach,” Menalippe continues “and that feeling has never gone away. There is a fate waiting for you beyond our shores, and I think both of us know you cannot resist the need to go to it,”

Donna drops her eyes, feeling a little shaken at hearing the decision a part of her had already known she’d made said aloud. Menalippe takes one hand away from where it is clasping hers and tilts her head back up.

“Heroes seldom _can_ resist the call of destiny, Donna,” she says “and when they do, it all too often ends in tradgedy. There is no shame in this,”

Donna nods, and then pulls her hands away. She turns to look at the table and the items on it again instead. Her heart feels heavier and lighter at the same time, and her throat still feels tight.

“What are these?” she asks, reaching out again and this time brushing her hand against the cool metal of the gauntlets.

“These,” Menalippe says, picking up the gauntlets and giving a slight gesture for Donna to remove the ones she is already wearing “were forged by Hephaestus on Mount Olympus. They will never tarnish, and more importantly-” she fits them on her wrists, a completely perfect fit that feels _right_ to the younger of the two “-they will never _break._ If you wanted to, you could block a sword strike with these,”

Donna nods, twisting her arms slightly to get a better look at the gauntlets on them.

“This,” Menalippe continues, picking up the sword, laid horizontally flat across her palms, and handing it to Donna the same way “was likewise. You’ll find that there are few edges sharper than this one, and it will never dull or shatter,”

Donna nods again, then takes the sword by the hilt in one hand and lets it hang by her side.

“And this?” she asks, laying her free hand on the coiled rope. The faint glow around it increases slightly as though in response.

“That,” Menalippe says, this time making no move to pick it up or hand it to her “is the Lasso of Truth. Like the gauntlets and the sword, it will never break. It’s length is near infinite, at any point what you will it to be. And anyone caught within it will be unable to lie or deceive, compelled to tell the absolute truth,”

Donna picks the lasso up, and it feels right in her hand, just as the gauntlets feel right on her wrists and the hilt of the sword feel right in her grip. Just as her star blanket has always felt right against her skin.

“How long…” she starts to ask.

“...have they been waiting?” Menalippe finishes for her.

Donna nods.

“Does it matter?” Menalippe asks “They’ve been waiting for you to be ready to take them, and now you are,”

“Because I made my decision,” Donna concludes “I… stopped fighting the call of fate,”

“No,” Menalippe says, putting a hand on her shoulder and smiling “because you no longer _need_ to fight the call. Because you’re _ready_ to follow the call,”

Donna nods. One hand tightens around the hilt of the sword, the other around the lasso. She thinks about sisterhood and training and the stars and the ocean and the _horizon_ and the world beyond it.

“Yeah,” she says, feeling something like confidence and a lot like certainty blossom in her chest “Yeah, I am,”

* * *

She doesn’t _quite_ hug everyone before she leaves but only because not everybody _wants_ a hug. Of them all, she hugs Diana the longest, feeling reluctant to let go.

For all that she feels at peace with her decision, for all that it feels like something inside her is singing at no longer fighting the call pulling her towards the horizon, leaving Themyscira is still _hard_. This is all she remembers ever knowing. Every person, every place, every little detail. And soon she will never see any of it again.

When her goodbyes are complete, she squares her shoulders and she _smiles_ . She will miss Themyscira, miss every sister, but she _knows_ that this is right decision and she refuses to let sadness at the loss tarnish her last memories of this place.

She doesn’t leave via the ocean, via a boat. She had been given the option, the opportunity to put this off longer by _building_ a boat with everyone and learning how to sail it, but she didn’t take it.

She’s capable of leaving under her own power, after all.

Diana comes with her the furthest. Most of their sisters choose to remain by their homes. Hippolyta and Menalippe come with them to the bottom of the hill. But Diana is the only one Donna wanted to come with her to the top.

All the same, in the end, she stands alone on the cliff’s edge.

She moves to take the step forwards, to dip off of the cliff and then take flight and leave…

…and something _pangs_ in her heart and she spins on her heel and rushes back, crashing into Diana and wrapping her arms around her in one last hug.

It is only seconds before Diana returns it.

“I’m gonna miss you _so much,”_ Donna all but whispers.

“And I you,” Diana replies, her voice warm and maybe a little shaky.

When Donna pulls back, Diana is smiling at her and her eyes are bright. She puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Go,” she says, and Donna realises some of the brightness in her eyes is unshed tears “It’s what you are _meant_ to do,”

Donna nods and steps back, feeling a lot colder for the sudden lack of contact than usual. She turns and approaches the cliff.

She has a sheathed sword hanging at one hip, a coiled lasso hanging at the other, and silver gantlets gleaming on her wrists.

She has a cloak like it is made of the night sky around her shoulders, hanging down to her waist, with a hood that she pulls up over head but probably won’t stay there.

And she has power thrumming under her skin, power that she has had as long as she can remember.

A single, long, deep breath, in and out. A squaring of the shoulders, a preparation to jump.

And then…

…a dive.

She feels the strength beneath her skin and _pulls_ on it, like the horizon has always pulled on her, and her direction changes from falling to _soaring._ She can’t help the whoop that flies from her lungs as she does so, and doesn’t really want to.

She flies up and up and away, a shard of night sky in the daytime, away from Themyscira and towards Man’s World.

* * *

The first thing that hits her about Man’s World when she arrives there is how many _people_ there are.

She’s still high in the sky when she comes over land and she can see buildings, bigger than any she ever saw on Themyscira, stretching out as far as her eye can see, in a massive, sprawling network of roads and streets and alleyways. And everywhere is full of people. There are so many that from this high up, she can’t even pick out individuals, just lots and lots of _people._

Her eyes widen and she smiles brightly and something about this feels _wonderful._

And then the sound of something _screeching_ fills the air.

She looks down and sees bright lights flashing, red and blue red and blue red and blue, following the wailing that she now realises is a _siren_ , as a convoy of moving vehicles goes rushing down a road.

Not entirely sure why, but probably in part to curiosity, she follows them.

* * *

The day that the world is first introduced to Wonder Girl, she throws herself in front of a police officer about to take a bullet courtesy of a trigger happy bank robber.

The bullet clangs against the metal of her gauntlets and then clatters to the ground several metres away. For a moment, the world seems to freeze as it processes the presence of something _new._

And then the robber and her colleagues all open fire, at the same moment that the girl who stopped the bullet draws a _sword_ and charges towards them, deflecting every bullet that comes near her with the gauntlet on the wrist of the hand not holding the sword.

Her blade slices effortlessly through the metal of the guns, rendering her foes unarmed, so the robber nearest to her throws himself forward and into a melee fight. Briefly, he manages to grab the hood of her cloak and moves to pull on it to choke her, only to find himself stumbling as the fabric almost _melts_ forward and out of his grip, the cloak shifting and changing until it is a jumpsuit covering her entire body. The amount of time he spends gaping at what occurred is more than enough for her to punch him in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him out. Neither of his companions fare much better.

The entire situation is over before a single member of the police squad can respond.

With three unconscious bank robber sprawled around her feet, Donna sheathes her sword, turns to face the people she’s _hoping_ are the good guys, raises a hand in a wave and yells “Hi!”

* * *

It’s the officer she saved who names her Wonder Girl.

It isn’t really an intentional thing, just a silly little nickname to call her by when she starts popping up to help fight crime across the city. But eventually, a reporter overhears it, and the next day it’s in the papers, and then it just sort of sticks.

Most people think that the name Wonder Girl came from the things she can do. The flight, the bullet-blocking gauntlets, the sword that can cut anything. They think she gets called _Wonder Girl_ because of the wonder people feel when they look at her.

That’s not really it at all.

The officer she saved started calling her Wonder Girl because, when she turned to face them after stopping the robbers, and every time they saw her after that, they saw as much wonder in her eyes looking at them as they did at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of last notes:  
> Figuring out how to tie together Donna's backstories into something cohesive for this AU was actually a really fun task for me, and I hope that the end result satisfies! I'll confess that I'm not as familiar with Wonder Woman lore as I would like to be, but I've done a _lot_ of reading up, and sincerely hope that I got characterisations right! Donna's "star blanket" was an invention of my own for the AU and I hope its presence doesn't ruin immersion or anything (I mean, this _is_ a DC AU, I assume broken immersion would take a lot more than that)
> 
> Donna's character playlist is over at [this link here!](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLChG03wJV-ngpTfH7gB07hMGi58LYkla3)


	3. Acquainted With The Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have been one acquainted with the night.  
> I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.  
> I have outwalked the furthest city light. 
> 
> He watched his parents die, and he hides in the shadows and the alleys and watches Gotham's mobs fight like wild dogs. Dick Grayson decides to make a change, and he becomes Gotham's silent protector. As yet, he has no name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updating a little early this week since I'll be gone doing scholarship interviews all weekend. The title is from _Acquainted With The Night_ by Robert Frost.

He has no name.

If they talk about him, they call him the Gotham Vigilante. Many people don’t even believe he exists, but recently the streets of Gotham have begun to feel a little safer, and children look up at the rooftops to see if they can spot a caped figure leaping from building to building in the moonlight.

His name is Dick Grayson, and when he was ten he watched his family die.

The police asked him a few questions, but when he described the face of the man he swore had killed them they wouldn’t listen. Dick’s always been good at reading people, and disinterest, boredom, exhaustion was written in every movement of the two officers who had come to talk to him.

He left the circus and ran and ran and never looked back.

He ended up living in an abandoned warehouse with a bunch of other kids- cold, but not as cold as the Gotham streets in winter. A few guys with guns broke into the warehouse once and scared away the kids.

Dick hid in the rafters for almost an hour before he dropped down onto the leader and slammed him to the ground and pulled the gun out of his hand and when one of the other thugs tried to hit him he vaulted over his head, out of the way. He was quick and halfway-hidden in the shadows and it only took a few minutes to chase away the last few guys. When they left, he slumped against a wall, shivering.

He spent the rest of the night finding all the other kids and bringing them back to the warehouse, hiding how his hands were shaking from the leftover adrenaline. He realized that he almost liked the rush of fighting, like a free-fall- dangerous and heartpounding and like fire in his blood.

Conditions everywhere in Gotham were bad. Dick had seen a lot of bad cities with the circus, but this… half the city was constantly afraid, living in tumble-down buildings and a blur of headlights and neon signs, and the streets were full of freezing homeless kids.

He was going to do something about it.

He needed money. He started running messages for the different gangs on the streets- he wasn’t big, but he was fast, fast, fast at travelling through Gotham, jumping between streetlights and running along rooftops in the icy rain. (And mobsters payed surprisingly well to make sure their messages wouldn’t be intercepted by the police. Once Dick became a well-known face on the streets, he started getting paid in handfuls of bills, twenties and hundreds.)

As the months went on, he learned every inch of the city, how to throw himself into the darkness and land rolling on the next rooftop and how to climb scaffolding as fast as climbing stairs and just how to kick off of a wall to launch himself high enough that the tips of his fingers could catch a balcony or fire escape.

He still carries messages during the day, but in the night he protects his own. The Gotham Vigilante, they call him on the streets, and some of them don’t believe in him and some of them do. They say, he’s a young man in a long black coat who never shows his face. They say he flies like a bird or that he runs on walls. They say he’s six feet tall and quick as lightning and his eyes glow blue in the dark.

And as the whispers grow louder, grainy pictures of a cloaked shape slinking through the shadows of Gotham passed around the internet, he comes to the attention of the Supergirl.

*****

He’s at the docks late one night, watching the crates being unloaded by a couple of men. One of Gotham’s gangs is bringing in weapons later tonight, and he means to intercept the delivery. And then she appears. Dick wonders if he’s been dosed with some kind of hallucinogen, because _Supergirl_ is drifting down out of the sky, blue bodysuit and red boots and red cape and golden hair all so much brighter than anything he’s seen in Gotham in _years_ that she seems to radiate light like the summer sun.

She’s looking right at him.

He nods down to the docks and makes a shushing motion, and she looks down before flitting away to perch next to him. “What are you looking for?”

“Weapons shipment,” says Dick, barely moving his mouth. “Should be coming in on this freighter.” He lifts a pair of binoculars to his eyes and leans forwards, lips drawing into a fierce, dangerous smile. “Well, if it isn’t Joe Tregear,” he murmurs.

Joseph Tregear is having a pretty good night. He’s unloading the last crate of ammunition for his boss, finishing up the job a little early. This new boss is off his rocker for sure- who talks through a _puppet?-_ but he pays well.

And then the Gotham Vigilante drops out of the sky. Joe’s never believed in the stories Vigilante, but he’s heard enough to recognize him on sight. Long black coat, blue goggles over his eyes, and a sharp, crooked smile. Not to mention that he just... _appeared_ out of the darkness.

“Evening, Joe,” says the Vigilante in a friendly voice, twirling something sharp and silver in his left hand.

“Thought you’d be taller,” Joe growls, setting down the crate and pulling out his gun.

“Thought you’d be smarter,” the Vigilante retorts, and his right hand shoots forwards to twist the gun away, throwing it across the wet wooden planks. The sharp silver thing in his left hand is suddenly under Joe’s chin, pricking the skin of his throat. “Let’s settle this fast. I’m sure you have a shady bar or somewhere to be, and I’m a busy guy. Who are you working for?”

“Go to hell,” spits Joe, and swings a punch at the Vigilante. He figures his odds are pretty good- he’s at least twice the smaller man’s size. And then the Vigilante catches his punch in one slender hand and crushes his knuckles together with a grip like steel.

“Wrong answer. You get one more chance, if you give me the information I want you can go free.”

“Scarface. He calls himself Scarface.”

The Gotham Vigilante loosens his grip ever so slightly, and nods. “You know a real name? Any other details? Ever see him in person?”

“He’s crazy,” says Joe with a shrug. “Talks through a doll. Like a- a ventriloquist. It’s the doll that’s called Scarface, I don’t know the ventriloquist’s name.”

The Vigilante lets go of him and steps back, still twirling the silver blade in one hand. “I’m afraid I have to take this cargo,” he says. “You can go, though.” There’s something dangerous in his voice that tells Joe that running is his best option right now, and he takes off at a dead sprint, glancing over his shoulder at the vigilante watching him leave.

*****

“Pretty impressive,” says Supergirl, landing lightly on the dock next to him.

“Thanks,” Dick replies. He uses his knife to pry open one of the crates and whistles. “Holy stockpile,” he says. “If all of these crates have this much ammunition in them, Scarface must be supplying a small army.”

Looking up at Supergirl, he adds, “What are you doing here?”

“Maybe I wanted to meet another hero,” she says, sitting on a stack of shipping containers and swinging her feet. “See if you had everything under control over here.”

“You’re not very old, are you?” asks Dick, tilting his head.

“Neither are you.”

“People can’t see _my_ face. Pretty sure they think I’m a small adult.”

“People don’t look at my face, not really. Not _closely._ ”

“True,” Dick says thoughtfully. Now that he really looks at her, past the big bright _S_ and the ruby-red cape, her face is small and round, splashed with freckles. If she were a human she’d be even younger than he is, maybe twelve or thirteen.

“You want to help out?” he asks.

“Sure,” Supergirl says. “I’m Supergirl,” she adds unnecessarily. “But I don’t know what you’re called. People just call you the Vigilante.”

“I don’t have a name,” Dick tells her.

After a second, he reconsiders. Because if you can’t trust _Supergirl,_ then who _can_ you trust? He sticks out his hand and smiles. “Dick Grayson.”

Supergirl’s handshake isn’t as painful as he was expecting it to be, and she grins right back at him. “I’m Kara Zor-El.”

“Want to help me find this ventriloquist character?”

“I’ve got nothing better to do tonight,” Kara says.

*****

They go to Dick’s apartment, a tiny place just off of Crime Alley- you’d be surprised how many people are willing to overlook the fact that they’re renting an apartment to a child- and he changes from his coat and goggles into a patched brown jacket and the electric blue beanie that’s become something of a signature article of clothing. To get close to Scarface, he’ll need to be message runner Dick Grayson- bright, polite, nonthreatening.

“Do you have anything else to wear?” he asks Kara. “You’re a little...visible right now.” She shakes her head, and he shrugs. “You’re about my size, you can borrow something.”

“This is kind of exciting,” Kara says. “I’ve never really gone undercover before. We don’t really have gangs in Metropolis, either, I thought it was just in movies.”

“You’re not _really_ from Metropolis, are you? Here, wear these. Bathroom’s on the left.”

“How did you know?”

“You don’t have the right accent. People say you’re an alien, but you still had to learn English _somewhere._ I’d guess...Nebraska?”

“Kansas.”

“Close enough," Dick shrugs. "The circus was in the Midwest a lot. Nice place."

Kara blinks. "The  _circus?"_

"I was in the circus. With my parents." He hunches his shoulders and looks out the window at the rooftops, briefly lit up by the moon as it breaks through the clouds overhead. "After they...died, I sort of ran away."

 

*****

It only takes a little poking around to track down Scarface. Kara tags behind Dick as he slips through the alleys, keeping off the main roads. A few people wave to him, and he waves back with a grin.

“Hey, Grayson. Little late for you to be out, isn’t it?”

“You know what they say, V. City never sleeps.”

As they head towards the heart of the Bowery, the buildings get more run-down, so much that you’d scarcely be able to believe most of them were still inhabited. The streets are empty so late at night, and the only sound is the occasional roar of a car driving past on the main road.

“Sources say Scarface set up shop in Crime Alley somewhere,” Dick says quietly. He looks around until he sees a few vans parked in front of a rundown warehouse. “That looks like it might bear checking out.” They haven’t even entered the building when someone yells,

“Grayson!”

“Yeah?” Dick says, looking around. There’s a big man leaning out of one of the windows, a thug Dick’s seen around before. He used to be a low-level enforcer for the Unified Crime Family, never too bright but always reliable.

“You free to run a message?”

“Depends how much you’re paying,” Dick calls back easily. His eyes flicker around the warehouse, taking in possible entrances and exits. The vans, he notices, don’t have dry patches under them. It’s only been raining for about an hour, if the pavement underneath was already wet when they got there then likely whoever was driving is still inside the building.

The thug vanishes for a few seconds before sticking his head out again. “Five hundred to run over to the Diamond District and drop off a note.”

Kara gives a shocked gasp, and Dick motions for her to be quiet. “Who’s paying for it?” he asks. “I don’t want counterfeit again.”

“Scarface.”

“Don’t think I know him,” Dick says with a shrug and a frown. “I better get home.” He ducks behind a car and into an alley, clambering up onto a fire escape and out of the man’s line of sight, and Kara follows him.

“Now we know Scarface is in there, at least,” she says as she flies up to sit next to him. “You want to go in and get him?”

“Sure,” Dick grins. “That’s why I brought you along. You feel like kicking down some doors?” 

Kara laughs and cracks her knuckles before rocketing forwards, and Dick winces as he hears the doors smash and the sound of gunfire. Someone crashes through a window and into a dumpster. Silent as a prayer, he slips into the warehouse after her and steps over the bodies of a few unconscious thugs.

"The walls are all painted over with lead paint," says Kara. "I can't see." 

"Hang on," Dick says quietly, and opens the next set of doors. These lead into a large open room full of what he thinks for a single heartstopping moment are bodies, but turn out to be merely articulated wooden dolls. Still, their blank faces make his skin crawl. "It's full of... _dolls,"_ he breathes, and Kara stirs behind him.

There is a gust of air as she floats forward, looking around. "I know a kid this ventriloquist might get along with," she says quietly, turning her head to scan the rows of dolls and carving tools. And then she lunges toward Dick and snatches him out of the way as gunshots rattle, bullets ricocheting off the ground where he was standing. "There!" She points to the catwalk.

"Thought he'd be bigger," says Dick with a frown. The ventriloquist is a small balding man with thick glasses, clutching a doll in a pinstripe three-piece suit. The doll appears in much better shape than the ventriloquist, whose clothes are tattered and who is trembling as Kara floats down towards him. Dick swings forwards and flips in the air, grabbing the gun away and throwing it over the side of the catwalk. It smashes against the ground far below, and the ventriloquist winces at the noise. Dick tilts his head curiously- he thinks he recognizes this man from somewhere. Some gang, maybe? Small-time stuff.

"He _found_ us," the ventriloquist says, and the doll hits him in the back of the head.

"Shut up," it snarls. Dick startles at the difference in the two voices and glances at Kara uncertainly before stepping forwards.

"We'll just get you to Arkham, Mr... Wesker, is it?" Dick says softly, moving forwards slowly but steadily. He doesn't break eye contact with the ventriloquist, who stays frozen in place for a moment before fumbling for a handgun. Before Dick can move out of the way Kara is there, crumpling the gun in one fist. Her eyes burn red for a moment and the doll explodes into flame, and the ventriloquist shrieks and throws away the burning chunk of wood.

"You can't  _do_ that!" he protests. "You've killed him!"

Dick frowns. "Mr. Wesker, are you coming quietly or not?" he asks, already starting to shift into a combat stance. He's surprised when the man goes limp and raises his hands, still shaking. 

"It was Scarface that did it," he protests weakly. Dick almost doesn't bother to tie his hands, seeing how frail the ventriloquist has become. 

"Well," he says, still in a low, calm voice that could be almost friendly, "You'll be able to talk to someone at Arkham. Maybe they'll let you out early." Police sirens sound outside, and Dick says under his breath, "Time to leave."

Once they're outside again, standing on a rooftop and watching the city lights spread out in a glittering web below, Kara says, "That was... _weirder_ than what we have in Metropolis."

"Isn't one of your guys a kryptonite-powered robot? Saw you fighting him on the news the other day."

"Fair enough."

They work together now and again over the next two months. Once to track down the Joker in Metropolis, once to stop Lex Luthor’s latest plot (which involved a timed prison break, nuclear launch codes, and an absolutely outrageous amount of Kryptonite) and once they meet up, Dick the message-runner in his patched brown jacket and an electric blue beanie pulled over his dark curls and Kara Kent from Kansas.

“What brings you to Metropolis?” asks Kara when she spots him sitting on a bench outside a coffeeshop.

“Maybe I wanted a vacation,” says Dick dryly. “Work. Someone’s been shipping tech into Gotham. I got some off of one of Falcone’s men, and it looked Lexcorp to me. Ray-gun sort of thing, and a shirt with bulletproof material woven into it.”

“Are you sure it was Lexcorp? Luthor doesn’t usually sell his stuff to gangsters, it might _tarnish his reputation.”_

“Brought it to a friend of mine to confirm. She hacked into the records for Lexcorp’s R&D department and said they’ve got this kind of thing in development. Just prototypes, though,” he says, drawing the ray gun in question out of a pocket and tossing it back and forth in his hands.

He looks at Kara with a quick flash of a smile and asks, “You wouldn’t be interested in staking out Lexcorp tonight, would you?”

*****

“We can never see the stars in Gotham,” says Dick, laying on his back on a rooftop opposite Lexcorp’s main research facility. “But I used to see them all the time before- when I was with the circus.”

Kara is floating a little above the roof, bored and chewing bubblegum. She blows a bubble and pops it before telling him, “We’ve got lots of stars in Kansas, too. It’s gorgeous, even though the constellations are so strange.”

“That’s right,” Dick says quietly, rolling into a sitting position and looking through his binoculars at the building. He doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “You grew up on Krypton.”

“Yeah,” says Kara.

“What constellations did you have there?” A red car rolled up to the building, and Dick tensed, shifting to perch on the edge of the roof. It left almost immediately, and his head turned slowly as he watched it go down the road.

“My favorites were the Nightwing and Flamebird,” says Kara, tilting her head up towards the stars. “They’re Kryptonian god-heroes. The legends say that in their true forms they look like great dragon-birds, but they take great heroes as Kryptonian hosts. When their hosts die they are reborn to start the cycle anew... Nightwing is the bringer of hope and justice, a catalyst of change. They used to say its eyes were like galaxies and its wings were as vast as the sky. Flamebird is its mate, or partner, or sibling- it depends on which version of the myths you read. The fire-bringer, symbol of death and rebirth.” She hesitates and looks at him, holding still as a statue as he watches the building.

“Actually, you remind me of Nightwing.”

Dick blinks. “What?”

"I never met him, obviously, he's a myth, but you remind me of all the things Nightwing's supposed to represent. The hope and the light but also the never ending drive to fight for justice. Seeing you in action is like what I imagine seeing the real Nightwing would be like. Wait, that van’s lined with lead. I can’t see inside.”

Dick narrows his eyes as the van swings around behind the lab. “Let’s go,” he says. Kara grabs him and swoops over the building, hovering over the van.

“Those are Falcone’s men for sure,” Dick whispers as half a dozen armed men pile out. The back doors of the lab slide open and a woman in a lab coat stands in the entryway with a briefcase in her hands. “Set me down, and stay back.”

“Lovely weather, isn’t it?” he asks loudly as Kara drops him and swoops away. Immediately, the thugs begin firing on him, and he flips behind the van as bullets zip past his face. “Much nicer than Gotham, wouldn’t you agree?” He slips a throwing star out of his coat and throws it, and it whistles in a clean arc to bury itself into the center of the case that the woman is holding. “The next one goes into your hand,” he calls warningly.

Gunfire rattles around him again, and he ducks back into cover, taking a smoke bomb out of his pocket. He’ll need to question the woman for sure, and maybe the thugs too (although Falcone isn’t in the habit of telling his hired guns too much.) He can’t risk leaving his cover just yet, though.

“Kara,” he breathes, hoping she’s able to hear him over the gunfire. “Can you distract them?”

After a moment, he hears shouting, and the van stops shaking from the force of the bullets. Dick leaps on top of the van, grinning as he sees Kara slowly descending from the sky with her cape billowing behind her. The woman is backing away, towards the building, and Dick sprints towards her. He tackles her just as she reaches the doors and pulls the briefcase out of her hands. “What’s in here?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Why don’t you start with your name,” says Dick, ignoring the screaming behind him as Kara grabs the guns and crumples them like tissue paper. “Doctor…” He checks her ID card. “Nalani, is it?”

“Kaleo Nalani.”

“So. Am I right in thinking your boss doesn’t know about this? I don’t know a whole lot about how companies work, but I’m _pretty sure_ that prototype weapons are supposed to stay in the lab instead of being sold out to gangs. Now, why don’t you just tell me what’s in the case and how many weapons you’ve sold off, and we’ll all go back to our lives.”

Dr. Nalani looks at the briefcase and then glares back up at him.

“Is this really worth it?” he sighs and looks over his shoulder at the gangsters, now pinned against the side of the van as Kara floats menacingly in front of them. “Hey, you. Which of you is the leader?”

From the way their eyes flicker towards one of the men, he knows. “You. With the blue neck tattoos. Tell Falcone he’s done buying weapons from Lexcorp. Now, if your van’s still running after those bullets you unloaded into it, get out of Metropolis.”

“You’re letting them go?” asks Kara as the men pile into the van and drive away, tires screeching.

“I’ll catch them before too long,” he shrugs. “Or if they’re smart, they’ll turn themselves in to avoid talking to Falcone. Not a nice guy to bring bad news to.” Switching his attention back to the pinned scientist, he says, “I bet Luthor’s not going to be too happy about this either, but not for the same reasons. If, say, it were revealed that Lexcorp was working with Gotham mobsters? Geez.”

Nalani says nothing, and Dick reaches into his coat and pulls out the prototype ray gun. “I saw what these can do,” he says, almost to himself. “They cauterize the wound, clean cuts. Kind of wanted to try one.”

“What are you doing?” asks Kara. Dick doesn’t look at her, but he tosses the gun in the air and catches it, watching Nalani out of the corner of his eye.

“Fine, fine! I was selling the guns. We have extra prototypes anyway, company policy.”

“How many?”

“Seven guns. Five bulletproof shirts. Some explosives.”

Sirens and flashing lights herald the arrival of the police, and Dick stands up, looking at Kara. “Can you handle this? I’d rather not explain what I’m doing here.” He turns to leave.

“Wait,” calls out Nalani. “I saw you earlier, the way you move. Are you a metahuman?” Her voice is curious, but surprisingly sincere. _Scientists._

“Nah,” Dick says, and shoots Kara a small grin. “I’m the Nightwing.”

*****

They call him the _Nightwing_.

He wears a blue-lined cape that flows behind him as he runs, a blue bird’s silhouette displayed on his chest. The same silhouette glows on the Gotham City clouds every night, a summons to the Nightwing- and a reminder to everyone else that he is real, their hero and their beacon and their salvation.

People see him more often, riding through the streets on a motorcycle in pursuit of the city’s latest supervillain, talking to children in an alleyway, perched on the belltower of an old church and silhouetted against the silver moon.

Nobody ever realizes how young he is.

 

Commissioner Gordon suspects, thinks that the Nightwing looks almost similar to his daughter’s friend- but in this city, you take all the help you can get (and he doesn’t have any proof beyond a certain turn of phrase that both Dick Grayson and the Nightwing are very fond of using.)

“Holy Christmas in July, Commissioner,” says the Nightwing, appearing on the rooftop and gathering his cape around him. “I heard Freeze was out of Arkham, but I figured he’d be laying low for a while.”

For a moment he looks young and not mysterious at all, stamping his feet and blowing a cloud of frosty breath in the icy air. But then he takes a running start and throws himself into free fall, plummeting towards the streets below until he fires a grappling hook at the last possible moment and swings away to fade into the darkness and the blowing snow.

No child could move like that, swinging easily over the abyss and dodging bullets for a living.

Not even in Gotham.

_Right?_

 

Not too far away, Dick stops to talk to a few kids in an alley, getting information about Freeze’s whereabouts. He shows off a few tricks with his new Wingdings, modified versions of his old throwing blades. “I’ll have this snow cleared up in no time,” he says with a grin.

“Thanks, Mr. Nightwing,” pipes up the youngest of the children as Dick swings away.

 

_The bringer of hope. Eternally reborn to start anew._

Dick knows his name now.

He is the Nightwing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're halfway through the origin stories! Bruce will not be making an appearance in the origin stories, but he'll certainly be showing up later a few times... and since Gotham has a lot of child vigilantes there'll be a lot of characters based there, which is going to be super fun. And probably also the subject of a different fic in this series.
> 
> In other news, we are moving the character playlists from Youtube to Stayed Up All Night which is a really cute site for making playlists (and you can upload music from youtube, which is helpful.) 
> 
>  
> 
> [ Listen to Dick's playlist here!](http://suan.fm/mix/r4Ncwc-)
> 
> And the playlists from the previous two chapters have been moved to suan too (although they're also still on youtube.) 
> 
> [ Kara's moved playlist](http://suan.fm/mix/lMI0bbW)  
> [ Donna's moved playlist](http://suan.fm/mix/rMXRkAI)


	4. Fill The Unforgiving Minute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If all men count with you, but none too much;  
> If you can fill the unforgiving minute  
> With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,  
> Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,  
> And - which is more - you'll be a man, my son!  
> As is a near constant in most of the multiverse, a young boy visits his Aunt for the summer and gets struck by lightning. Only this time, that bolt from the blue is the first of its kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another early update this week, because this time _I've_ got a thing on tomorrow. I've been very excited to get to this chapter because it's my favourite of the one's I've written! Which is probably because the point of focus is one of my all-time favourite characters, with guest appearances from two of the others. And because it was easier to write than the others since I practically know _this_ lore like the back of my hand.
> 
> The title comes from the final stanza of Rudyard Kipling's _If-_

The origins of the Flash are not set in motion on a dark and stormy night, with rain pattering against and window and lightning in the sky. Nor do they start with a scientist in a lab, staying later than he maybe should have.

The origins of the Flash are set in motion on a bright and sunny morning, the first day of summer, the sky clear of clouds and birds chirping from the trees. They start with an eight year old boy, hiding under the covers of his bed with comic books and a torch, pretending he can’t hear the shouting that drowns out all the other sounds.

When silence falls and the birds can be heard outside the windows hidden by drawn curtains, the little boy sighs in relief, glad that it’s over for now.

And then he hears heavy footsteps coming up the hallway and barely has a chance to decide whether or not to pretend that he isn’t doing what he’s doing before the door opens.

“Aren’t you _up_ yet?” asks a voice wrought with irritation.

He has a feeling that it’s a rhetorical question, given that he’s clearly huddled under the blankets with a torch. All the same, he flicks the switch to turn to the torch off and pulls the blankets down so that they’re bundled in his lap and hide what is there.

“Morning, Dad,” he says, pulling his shoulders back so he’s not slouching (Dad _hates_ it when he slouches) “I’m dressed and I’ve brushed my teeth, just haven’t had breakfast yet,”

 _Because you and mum have been fighting since I woke up_ he doesn't say.

Rudy West _Frowns_ , capital letter deserved, and for a moment Wally worries he's somehow said something wrong. Maybe it was his tone? He’s always getting told off about tone and respect. Then realises where his dad is looking.

His eyes are very firmly fixed on the bundle of blanket that Wally has his arms crossed over. In hindsight, doing that probably made it very obvious that he was hiding something.

Wally pulls his arms back mere seconds before Rudy grabs the covers and pulls them away.

" _Comic books,_ Wally?" he asks, in the same tone another man might say _cockroaches._

Wally hangs his head.

"We've been _over_ this, son," Rudy says, dropping the covers still in his hands to the floor. Wally thinks he could've at least dropped them on the bed. "You need to-"

"-get my head out of the clouds and fantasies and focus on the real world," Wally repeats, a perfect parrot of the lecture he's heard many, many times before. Then his eyes go wide and he ducks his head "Sorry, shouldn't've interrupted,"

"No, you shouldn't have," Rudy agrees, raising an eyebrow "and if you can repeat that so well by now, you should at least be _able to follow it,"_

Wally hunches his shoulders, ducking his head further.

"Sorry, sir," he mumbles.

Rudy shakes his head and sighs.

"It's fine," he says, eventually, when it appears Wally isn't going to say anything more. The eight year old lifts his head, and then Rudy continues "Get up and pack your bags,"

Wally blinks a few times.

"Pack my bags?" he parrots.

"Your suitcase and whatever else," Rudy says, striding towards the curtains "stuff you'll need for a long trip. You're staying with your Aunt Iris this summer,"

Then he yanks the curtains open, allowing the sun to flood the room with sunlight, before turning around and walking to the door. Wally still hasn't moved.

" _Now,_ Wallace," he says.

"Yes, sir," Wally blurts, scrambling out of bed.

* * *

An hour later, after a rushed breakfast and trying to decide what to pack (he’d snuck in some comic books after much deliberation), he stands at the bus station, both his parents by his side. He tries very, very hard not to look anything but happy, because when he didn’t his mother has chided him (“ _I thought you liked your Aunt Iris, don’t look so morose,”_ ) and he hadn’t had a good answer for why he wasn’t happy.

He _is_ excited to see Aunt Iris again but…

_...but they’re sending me away._

It’s the thoughts that’s been carouseling around his head ever since he was told to pack his bags.

_They’re sending me away. What did I do wrong?_

There's a part of him that says he didn't do anything wrong and he's not being sent away. He's just getting a trip to Central City to get to stay with Aunt Iris because his parents know he likes her and he never gets to see her and she offered to let him stay sometime so she wants to see him like he wants to see her-

He thinks that part of him is a _liar._

The bus arrives and he gets on after telling them both not to worry about him with a smile. Once he’s seated, he pretends he doesn’t see them already arguing again and quashes the feeling of _as if they would._

* * *

The bus trip is three _weeks_ long rather than three _hours_ and he would swear to that on his grave, nevermind that he doesn’t have one yet.

A very nice old lady sits next to him at one stop. She asks how old he is and he smiles his sweetest smile and says “twelve, ma’am” because even though he’s _mature_ for his age and Aunt Iris is waiting at the end, he has a feeling she wouldn’t approve of an eight year old travelling on his own. She gives him a sweetie when she gets off a few stops later and he says thank you and tucks it into his suitcase when she’s not looking. You’re not supposed to eat sweets that strangers give you, even if they’re really nice old ladies.

He kicks his feet, scuffing the soles across the top of his suitcase on each swing (he can’t reach the floor to scuff them against _that_ instead) until the guy sitting in front of him snaps at him to _quit it._ So he tries to read one of his comics but trying to focus on the pictures and read the speech bubbles combined with the rocking of the bus and the scenery he can see rushing by out of the corner of his eye just makes him feel sick.

He can’t quite be bothered to open his suitcase to put the comic away, so he just tucks it into the netting pocket on the front.

Then he just sighs and stares out of the window until Central City comes in sight.

* * *

“Hey, kiddo!” Aunt Iris says, greeting him at the door of the bus as he’s coming off. “I was starting to think you’d never get here!”

“That makes two of us!” he chirps, his heart feeling lighter at seeing her despite his earlier misgivings. He can feel a genuine smile tugging at his lips and only barely stops himself jumping off the last step of the bus into a hug as he hops down two at a time.

His suitcase _clunks_ against the ground as it lands behind him and Aunt Iris wraps an arm around his shoulders. The sun is bright in the sky and Central City feels _alive_ in a way that Blue Valley never really has to him.

“How’re your parents?” Aunt Iris asks as they head to the terminal.

“Same as always,” he says, shrugging and looking around him in wide-eyed wonder.

“I see,” she says. If he were to look up at that moment he would see the disapproving, pensive look she shoots at the bus he came here alone on, and maybe even the glance at the comic showing at the front of his suitcase and the almost conspiratorial smile she has at the sight of it. He doesn’t look up though, so he sees none of this. She ruffles his hair “Well, they’re not what this trip is about. You ready to take on Central City, just you and me?”

“You _bet_ I am!” he declares, grinning ear to ear and brimming with the excitement of a child ready for _adventure._

* * *

Before they _really_ take on Central City, though, Aunt Iris wants him to meet “someone very special” that they are apparently going to be going for lunch with.

Whoever it is is _late._ Which is annoying because he wants to get to see Central with his aunt but apparently they can’t do that until he’s met this guy. So, they wait.

And then a blonde guy in a _bowtie_ comes rushing over, waving and apologising almost before he’s even in earshot.

“Am I late?” the guy asks, once he’s actually near to them.

“Do ducks quack?” Aunt Iris says, reaching forwards and grabbing the guy’s hand to pull him closer through the crowd.

“Wally,” Aunt Iris says, gesturing to the guy now standing next to her “this is my fiance, Barry. Barry,” this time she gestures in the opposite direction “my best friend and nephew, Wally,”

“Nice to meet you, Wally,” Barry says, holding out a hand “Iris has told me so much about you!”

“Nice to meet you too,” Wally says, shaking the offering hand because he knows his manners and resisting the urge to say _she’s never mentioned you_ because that would be rude (and he thinks she might have a few times in letters maybe anyways)

* * *

They go for lunch and Wally discovers that Barry works for the police. He asks if he has a gun and Barry explains that he’s a police _scientist_ so no, he doesn’t.

Wally says that that sounds boring. Aunt Iris counters that she thinks it’s _interesting_ and prompts Barry to talk about it. So Barry talks about it.

It’s _really boring._

For all that there are _some_ parts that sound a little interesting and Barry sounds like he’s genuinely passionate about his work - his entire face has lit up and he’s gesticulating wildly, at points just flapping his hands around as he talks - it just sounds _so boring_ . Probably the only way it could be more boring would be if he was actually _trying_ to be boring.

Wally glances over the back of his chair to check the clock for the third time since Barry started talking.

And then when it finally _is_ over, Aunt Iris has to go to _work_ and apparently now he has to spend the whole _afternoon_ with Barry.

It _is_ kinda nice that Aunt Iris’s fiance would actually take the day off of work just to spend time with him and stuff, but he’s _really, really boring._

...he wonders if Barry will maybe have a computer and if he’ll let him use the internet.

* * *

“So,” Barry says as they walk through the door “you like the Flash?”

Wally freezes just as he gets far enough in the door that Barry can close it.

“What?” he asks, knowing for certain that he hasn’t mentioned that at _all._ Maybe Aunt Iris had? But then, if she had, wouldn’t Barry have brought it up at lunch?

“You’ve got an issue in the front of your suitcase, kiddo,” Barry says, pointing to the issue in question that Wally hadn’t bothered to put away on the bus “Given that those were being published when _I_ was a kid and are pretty difficult to get your hands on… well, doesn’t make much sense to have one if you aren’t a fan anyways, right?”

“I guess,” Wally says, resisting the urge to bite his lip as he internally braces himself for the inevitable oncoming lecture. In an attempt to maybe ward it off, he blurts “My parents say that they’re a waste of my time and I need to get my head out of the clouds and my feet on the ground. I need to be more down to earth,”

“Is that so?” Barry says, somewhat drawing the words out longer than they need to be.

He motions to a sofa in a clear indication that Wally should sit down, so he does. Then Barry walks across the room to a cupboard and starts looking through it for something. Wally is almost tempted to try and peek past to see what’s in there, but the way Barry is standing is just about perfect to block any chance the eight year old has of that without actually coming over to look around him.

“So,” Barry says, voice slightly muffled by the cupboard he more inside of that out now. “When your parents say ‘down to earth’, what do they mean?”

“Not wasting time on useless dreams and fantasies and focusing on the real world and doing worthwhile stuff with my life,” Wally recites, not even needing to stop and think about it.

Barry pauses for a moment and then resumes looking for whatever it is he’s looking for.

“In your own words?” he prompts.

This time Wally _does_ need to stop and think about it.

“I…” he starts “I need to… not spend time doing stuff like reading comic books because they’re just made up stuff that could never happen so it’s wasting time. I need to focus more on stuff that’ll get me a job that does important stuff when I’m grown up because that’s the most important thing I can do. Even if it’s boring. And it doesn’t matter if that’s what I _want_ to do because it’s more important than what I want,”

The room almost goes quiet at that and Wally could swear he hears his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He hadn't meant to actually _say_ that last bit and he’s almost certain it came out sounding cheeky.

There isn’t any follow up of being shouted at for it, though. Barry just pulls a box almost half as big as Wally himself out of the cupboard, looking rather triumphant that he found what he was looking for.

“And a person that achieved that would be like…” Barry says, as though inviting him to fill in the blank, while he carries the box over to the coffee table.

Wally doesn’t say anything but he can’t quite help the way his eyes flicker up to actually look at Barry before he focuses on the box on the table. There’s a twist in his stomach, a worry about when he’s going to be yelled at, but curiosity is starting to override it.

“Ah. _Me,_ ” Barry says, sounding like that’s exactly what he expected.

Wally chances a look up and Barry is _smiling_ . So it probably _was_ what he was expecting. Which means he won’t get in trouble. Probably. Hopefully.

Barry pushes the box across the table, closer to Wally, and raps the top of it with his knuckles like he’s knocking on a door.

“Open it up,” he says.

Wally shuffles forward a little, reaches out, and does as he’s told. When the flaps of the box are unfolded and he has a clear view of the contents, his jaw drops open.

The box is full of comics. _Lots_ of them. All _organised_ , by issue number and series title, by the looks of it, but _still._ The _entire box_ is full of _comics._

Barry is grinning widely when he looks up, jaw still open and eyes gone wide. As though to further drive home whatever point he’s making, he sidesteps, revealing the rest of the cupboard and the _minimum_ three more boxes that look identical to the one in front of him in it, among various other objects.

“Do those all…?” Wally asks, trailing off.

“Yep,” Barry says, his thumbs hooked into his pockets.

“I don’t…” Wally starts to say, but can’t finish. _I don’t understand._

“Fun fact about life,” Barry says, smiling like he’s about to say something he thinks is profound “You can have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground at the same time. And it’s the _best_ way to live,”

Wally blinks. And then blinks again.

“How…?” he starts, trying to reconcile that with everything he already knows.

“Well, being tall is an easy start,” Barry says “and looking at you…” he holds up a finger and a thumb, as though measuring Wally’s height through them “…you’re gonna be six foot at least,”

He takes one look at Wally’s bewildered face and adds “ _Trust_ me, kid. I’m a _scientist,”_

Wally can’t help himself. He laughs. It’s quick and short and more of a giggle, but Barry grins like he’s won the lottery when he hears it.

“There’s nothing wrong with dreams, kiddo,” Barry says, stepping around the table to sit down on the arm of the sofa next to the eight year old, tucking one foot up and between the arm and the seat cushion. “They’re not going to hurt you. The whole reason I’m where I am today is because I dreamed of being able to help people like the Flash always did in the comics. If anything, a lack of dreams will hurt you a lot more,”

There’s a pause as though Barry is letting this sink in.

“Now…” he continues, leaning forward and pulling out an issue of a familiar title, the number on the front declaring it the next one in the story arc that the one in Wally’s bag belongs to “...wanna read some of these?”

 _“Yes,”_ Wally says, all but lunging for the issue with all the energy and desperation to _make the most of this_ that a child given permission to do something they usually aren’t has.

Barry is clearly delighted by this enthusiasm, but Wally is already too engrossed to notice or care.

* * *

Almost an hour later, when a pile of comics has built up around them both, Wally sees Barry lean back and stretch out of the corner of his eye. He almost doesn’t pay attention to it, but then he starts to speak, so Wally flicks his attention from the comic to the adult.

“I just had an idea,” Barry says, looking very close to grinning.

“...what?” Wally asks, curious and sort of excited.

“These are cool and all - really, _really_ cool,” Barry says, tapping the pile of comics “but there’s something that could be even _cooler,”_

Barry brushes off his trousers, even though there’s nothing that could’ve fallen onto them, and stands up.

“Ever wanted to see a lab like the one where Jay Garrick got his powers?” he asks, voice just a bit _too_ casual, one hand in his pocket.

“Have I _ever,”_ Wally breathes, eyes going wide and his grin even wider.

* * *

_“Whoah,”_ he gasps, when he steps through the door and Barry flips the lightswitch “this is _so cool,”_

“I _guess,”_ Barry says, with the tone of someone who isn’t guessing at all and knows exactly how cool a thing is “I mean, it was a bit of a pain to find in the first place, a flat that could support a back room lab, and really, it’s just for the science and research and stuff I want to do when I’m not at work, or when I bring work home with me…”

“No _way,”_ Wally says, disbelief heavy in his tone “you made your job sound so _boring_ when you were talking about it!”

He really, really had. But if that sort of work was done in a place like _this_ then maybe Barry was just really bad at explaining things.

He misses whatever Barry says in response to that because something shiny catches his eye.

It’s a small silver object, about the size and shape of a coin. He kind of wants to pick it up.

“What’s this do?” he asks, picking it up.

"Oh, that?” Barry replies, while Wally fiddles with it “Well it-”

_FWUMPH_

The world rather abruptly goes a startling shade of _utterly red._

“-does that,” he hears Barry finish, slightly muffled by whatever the stuff all around now him is.

“What _is_ this?” Wally asks, poking it.

“An experimental fabric I started developing in college,” Barry says. The world turns from completely red to normal again as he pulls it off of Wally’s head “it expands upon contact with air, sort of like an emergency life raft, and that-” he points at the silver coin in Wally’s hand “-sucks out all the nitrogen to compress it. It’s also pretty friction-proof, though that’s a characteristic I haven’t figured out the cause of yet,”

“ _Cool,”_ Wally says again, looking at the coin in his hand. “So how do I…?”

“There’s an inlaid button on the left,” Barry says, holding the fabric up to the coin. Wally finds the button and presses it and the pile of red vanishes with a _fwooph._

Wally turns the coin over in his hand a few times and then sets it down on the table with a massive grin.

“What else’ve you got in here?” he asks.

* * *

The answer is a lot of things. A lot of very, very cool things.

 _“Why_ are you a police scientist?” Wally asks, swinging his legs in and out from under the stool he’s sitting on, watching enraptured as Barry demonstrates the process of making the expanding fabric “why aren’t you working for, like, Waynetech or something? This stuff is _awesome,_ ”

“Well,” Barry says, eyes briefly flickering to something sitting on the desk “I guess I just felt I could do more good in forensics,”

But Wally caught the eye flicker and he saw what he was looking at, so the unsaid words don’t go unsaid much longer.

“No. _Way,”_ he says, all but gaping “you became a police officer _because of the Flash?”_

There is a definite red tint to Barry’s face.

“I need to get something from the chemical cupboard,” he mutters, moving to do so.

“I’ll get it!” Wally decides, hopping off of the stool and dashing over to the cabinet. “Which is it you need?”

Whatever Barry’s answer would have been, it’s drowned out by the deafening _KRAKATHOOOOM_ of a lightning strike hitting home.

* * *

 

He wakes up in a hospital bed with Aunt Iris at his side. The world feels strange, like everything is the same yet somehow _new._ For a moment, he swears he feels a buzzing beneath his skin but it’s gone almost before he can realise it’s there.

“Hey kiddo,” Aunt Iris says, smiling when she sees that he’s opened his eyes. “We were getting worried about you,”

“How long…?” he starts to ask, mouth feeling very dry.

“About five hours,” Aunt Iris replies “Your heart stopped a few times but the doctors say you’re stable now,”

And then, before he can ask anything else, the door bursts open and his mother rushes in.

She’s pretty smothering but it’s kind of nice to know she came all the way from Blue Valley. After her initial frantic talking at him about how _worried_ she was and _we were so scared when we got the phone call,_ she starts talking mostly to Aunt Iris, so he lets himself zone out.

That is, until he catches his name.

“-Wally is coming home as soon as the doctors release him-”

“ _What?”_ he croaks, wide-eyed and looking over frantically. “But...but I _just_ got here!”

“You got struck by _lightning_ , sweetheart,” his mother says, reaching over and holding one of his hands. “You’re _coming home,”_

He knows that tone and he knows there’s no arguing with it, so he just sighs and nods his head. So much for spending the summer with Aunt Iris.

* * *

He’s released from the hospital a couple of hours after that. When they start to leave, Aunt Iris steers them towards the waiting room, and for a moment Wally isn’t sure why, until he spots the person all but perched on the arm of a sofa, a familiar bag sitting in his lap.

Barry is on his feet and walking over to them almost the instant they enter the room.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says, crouching down to eye level. “And I’m _so sorry,”_

“‘wasn’t your fault,” Wally replies. He almost shivers after he says it because he can _feel_ his mother’s piercing gaze over his shoulder, even though it’s not directed at him, and knows that _she_ most definitely does think that it’s Barry’s fault.

Barry appears unaffected though, not even glancing up. Instead, he puts the bag he’s carrying wheels down on the floor and passes the handle to Wally.

“Figured you might want this,” he says. He’s still smiling slightly and Wally can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

“Thanks,” he says, pulling it a little closer.

After that, everything from leaving the hospital to arriving at the bus station is a bit of a blur.

The goodbye feels harder than any of the previous goodbyes there have been between him and Aunt Iris. He hugs her tight and buries his face in her shoulder and for a few moments it feels like time slows down and this single moment can last forever.

Reluctantly, he pulls away. He gives Aunt Iris a shaky smile and she ruffles his hair. He glances over her shoulder and Barry gives him a small smile from where he’s waiting.

Wally blinks back tears, and then grabs the handle of his bag and walks towards his mother and the bus home.

It feels even longer than the trip here and his stomach starts rumbling an hour in, even though they ate just before they left. He starts digging through his bag to see if maybe he can find a snack.

He finds something else instead, several somethings, which he most certainly didn’t put there himself.

He glances to the side, notices that his mother has fallen asleep, and then pulls out the issue of Flash Comics that’s furthest to the front and feels an almost incredulous smile start to stretch across his face when he realises it’s the issue after the one he left off on before Barry showed him his lab.

There’s a soft _shifff_ as a small bit of paper slips out of the comic.

_Remember what I told you about dreaming, Kid. Happy reading! ~ B_

He grins widely, and then slips the note back into the front of the issue and slips _that_ back into his bag. Then he keeps looking for a snack.

* * *

Coming home from the lightning strike, everything is _different._

No matter how much he eats, he’s always, always hungry now. He keeps getting scolded for being greedy at meals and he tries to explain that he’s just still _hungry_ he’s not trying to be greedy but all it earns him is a sharp “you may be a growing boy, but you _don’t_ need a third helping!”

The only thing almost as bad as the hunger is the way the world keeps slowing down on him. He’s not sure what sets it off but it happens a lot and nobody _believes_ him when he tries to explain. He’s scolded for not paying attention but he’s _trying_ and it’s just that it’s hard to understand what people are saying when their speech is in slow motion.

And no matter how much everyone seems to think it’s some silly excuse he’s come up with, he _knows_ he’s not faking it, because some days, when he tunes into Frequency X and sits and talks with the only friend he has other than Aunt Iris and _maybe_ Barry (who has started sending him some letters along with Aunt Iris’s ones), he can’t even understand what Krakl is saying.

His parents are annoyed and frustrated and mad at him and _that’s_ nothing new but now so are his teachers.

He’s _tried_ , he really has. But life was hard enough before and it’s _impossible_ now.

So he’s doing something that he’s thought about before but never really considered going through with until now.

A week after his ninth birthday, the frozen air bites at him through the winter clothes he’d tried to throw on as quietly as possible, and the rucksack he’d stuffed full of whatever he thought was important hangs heavy on his shoulders. The only real light he has to navigate by is the moon, high above in an almost cloudless sky, and he really, really wants to run and get away from here as quickly as possible but he’s worried that’ll be too loud. He needs to get further away before he tries running.

He’s running away from home and he’s gonna… gonna go really far away, and change his name, and they’ll never, _ever_ find him.

He walks and he walks and he walks, stumbling over a few rocks and roots that he doesn’t quite see, staying within the trees and out of view of the road.

Eventually, he reaches a distance he thinks he can run from.

He goes through the stretches that he learned in gym class, takes a deep breath, and then _bolts._

He can hear wind and lightning in his ears and the ground is disappearing under his legs, the world whizzing by in the corners of his eyes like out of the window of a car. He throws his head back and laughs long and loud.

The lightning made a lot of things in his life harder, that’s for sure.

But the one _good_ thing it gave him is the _best._

* * *

He skids to a stop just outside of Keystone City and wonders why he’s surprised at himself.

He looks up at the sign, and thinks of a comic issue that is sitting in his bag. He thinks of accidents in labs and of running faster than any human can _dream_.

He grins and steps over city limits.

The Flash belongs in Keystone, after all.

* * *

For a few weeks, Keystone and Central have crime after crime foiled by a figure moving faster than eye and mind can process, with a costume made out of odds and ends and the sorts of things a nine year old runaway can get ahold of. Things like jackets and jumpers with the hoods always pulled up, a scarf wrapped more around the bottom half of his face than his neck, a chipped and broken masquerade mask that someone threw out. Whenever he stops to talk with the police, which isn’t often, he always keeps his face hidden and is always vibrating fast enough that his voice is distorted.

And then, in the dead of night, police scientist Barry Allen receives a knock at his window. It’s too dark outside and too bright inside to actually see anything but a reflection in the window, so he gets up, walking over on the balls of his feet, and opens the window to look out.

“I need a costume,” says a kid, perched on his fire escape like he's ready to flee at any moment. He's visibly shivering, even through the vibrations keeping his voice as distorted as always. “Can you help me?”

Whatever else happens that night, whatever is said between the two, the next time that the Flash shows up to stop a crime, he’s clad in red and silver and has a lightning bolt emblazoned on his chest.

* * *

They say that the twin cities, Central and Keystone, are protected by a scarlet blur who can run up the sheer sides of buildings and across water. They say that he can cause things to explode with a touch and catch bullets and generate tornadoes from his hands. They say that hair as red as flame flows free in the wind above a scarlet cowl that shows eyes as green as a hummingbird’s beating wings, they say that his crimson costume is accented by silver as bright as the lightning that follows him when he runs. They say that that lightning chases him and chases him but can never catch him because he’s too fast even for a bolt from the blue.

They say that he calls himself _the Flash_ and outside the Twin Cities they call him _the fastest man alive._

But inside the Twins, they call him the fastest _boy._

Because that is what he is, they know. The rest of the world may blind themselves to the ages of their heroes, but Central and Keystone know a child when they see one.

And they know that the Flash is a child of the Twins. And they know that children of the twins are _incredibly_ stubborn, that once a child of the Twins makes up their mind to do something, nothing but themselves can make them stop.

And the Flash, they can see, has made up his mind to protect them.

So they do what they can to protect him in turn.

It’s not much, and it takes a while to start, but every family that can leaves some food out, just in case the speedster happens by. A (covered) plate of cookies like for Santa, a sandwich in a bag. It’s not much, but anyone that criticises the speedster for not being _quite_ perfect is quickly shut down. It’s not much, but there are celebrations and public thanks and every opportunity to show them how much they care is taken.

It’s not much.

But to one little boy in a scarlet suit, it’s _everything._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably a relevent chapter to bring up that these chapters _don't_ , actually, take place chronologically! Wally's becoming the Flash here takes place within a few months of Kara becoming Supergirl way back in chapter one! There _is_ a worked out timeline, but it's chock full of spoilers, so you'll have to take our word for it.
> 
> Additionally, there are a whole bunch of hints to one of my favourite headcanons being canon in this 'verse. If you can spot them and figure out the detail, you have my respect and also will make me very, very happy :)
> 
> And, lastly, Wally's playlist is over [here!](http://suan.fm/mix/F_yVPBn)


	5. And All The World Was Fair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Langsyne, when life was bonnie  
> An' a' the warl was fair,  
> The leaves were green wi' simmer,  
> For autumn wasna there."
> 
> There is a Bat in Gotham, working alongside the Nightwing in the shadows of the city. She loves the feeling of the city lights and the night wind rushing in her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second-to-last chapter in the origins! Before the final chapter, though, we'll be posting a Christmas special written by yours truly, so keep an eye out for that~
> 
> The title poem was chosen by Tmae and you can find the rest of it [here](http://www.rampantscotland.com/poetry/blpoems_langsyne.htm)
> 
> Babs and Dick's fight with the Joker is inspired by the episode _Old Wounds_ from _The New Batman Adventures_ because, as stated earlier, I am DCAU trash.  
>  Also I know only a tiny bit about coding and nothing about hacking so please forgive any glaring mistakes.

She has always known the world is broken.

Reading through her father’s files does nothing to help- homeless children found frozen in the streets, civilians gunned down or kidnapped by savage gang wars, the police hiding from criminals like the Scarecrow and Poison Ivy. But still, she’d rather _know_ the world is broken than hide behind a smile and a promise of sunlight.

Knowing something’s wrong is the first step to fixing it.

Barbara teaches herself how to hack into _anything_. When she’s twelve she spends eleven hours carefully probing the firewalls around the various records and accounts of one of the main enforcers of the Cosa Nostra crime family. She finds enough information to arrest not only him, but half of the mobsters in Gotham.

She teaches herself to fight like Supergirl, like the Gotham Vigilante who she _knows_ isn’t a myth. In fact, she gets a pretty good idea of who he is, from the suspicious things that her best-friend-almost-boyfriend asks her.

“Why do you need Lexcorp’s R&D records?” she asks.

“Just a hunch. I find stuff out, running messages across Gotham. It’s like people don’t think I can hear.” He kicks back and pulls a book off her shelf, not meeting her eyes. “Besides, wouldn’t you like to know what they’re developing over in Metropolis?”

Barbara can’t argue with that, and the next day she emails him with blueprints for a raygun and for armor that is as light and flexible as cotton.

When Dick becomes the Nightwing and starts working with the GCPD, stepping a little more into the light, she _knows._ Footage begins to appear on the internet, people calling down the Nightwing to take a selfie or taking video of him perched on their fire escape, surveying the city. A video, nine seconds of him fighting a handful of Maroni’s thugs, goes viral. Barbara stabilizes the video and enhances it, and compares it to her memories of the times she’s seen Dick running across the city with a message or a delivery, flipping through the air and landing rolling on a rooftop or a balcony.

 _Exactly the same._ She wonders why he didn’t tell her. She _knows_ why he didn’t tell her, on some deep-down level, but she wishes she’d found out from him, instead of from a blurry video taken from someone’s phone.

When she finds proof of a warhead being shipped into Gotham, she lights up the brand-new beacon and waits on the roof, dangling her feet over the edge and looking down at the city lights.

“Hello?” says the Nightwing behind her.

“We need to talk,” she tells him. “Two-Face is shipping in a nuclear bomb tonight.”

“Holy _meltdown._ Are you sure?”

“Positive. Dent’s smart, though, so he’ll be using it as-”

“-blackmail, probably. It’s the other villains I’m worried about. Joker would set off a warhead just to watch the city turn to ash, if he could get hold of one.” He frowns, looking out across the city. “It’s coming in by ship?”

“I think so,” Barbara says, and then he takes a running jump off the rooftop and vanishes. She stares into the darkness for a while, hair blowing around her face.

*****

The first time she tries it, she almost loses her nerve. She’s standing on the edge of an apartment building rooftop, and just a few feet across from her is another roof, a flat expanse of concrete. All she has to do is jump.

Traffic rushes past below her, and she takes a deep breath, backing up. For the past week, she’s been getting ready for this. She knows she can make the jump. It’s a fact. She trusts facts. But still, she feels a little ridiculous on a graffitied rooftop in the middle of the night in a hoodie and yoga pants and bright purple sneakers.

A bat flies past her, chasing a moth in great wild loops.

She wants to fly.

She runs towards the gap, three long, powerful steps, and throws herself into the air. There is a single terrifying moment when she can see the drop into the narrow alley below her, and then she is stumbling on her feet and scraping her palms on the rough surface of the next roof. Barbara grins and stands up and spins on the tips of her toes, feeling _alive._

And then she keeps running, along the edge of the roof, and leaps to the balcony of the next building and swings down to the next, dropping one floor at a time until she’s on the ground, in a cobblestone alley. She tilts back her head and laughs for the joy of it.

*****

The next night Barbara sees a big guy with a gun in the alley below her. He’s yelling at a girl, holding onto her wrist. He doesn’t notice the hooded figure sliding down the drainpipe until a hand taps his shoulder, and he turns around to get a boot in his face.

Barbara feels the man’s nose smash under her shoe, and there’s a wet cracking noise as he stumbles back with his hand over his face. Only her eyes are visible under her hood, and they glitter cold and fierce in the dim light of the streetlamps.

“Who are you?” asks the girl. She looks only a few years older than Barbara, and she’s got curly strawberry-blonde hair that puffs out around her face.

“I’m Batgirl. What’s your name?”

“Holly.” Holly looks down at the semi-conscious man bleeding on the ground. “I could’ve handled that,” she says without much conviction. She steps over him, heading for the main street, and by the time she looks back over her shoulder Batgirl is gone.

Barbara travels all over Gotham that night, from the Diamond District to Crime Alley, and she allows herself a rare moment of content as she races along the edge of a rooftop with an ornate rooftop garden dark and leafy on her left side and the multicolored city lights and the dizzying drop on her right.

Batgirl is spotted eight different times in one night, and three the next, and four the next, and the next. The Nightwing takes notice, and she sees him out of the corner of her eye, nearly blending in with the darkness. She pretends for a while that she doesn’t see him, until she’s perched on top of one of the Wayne Tower gargoyles. “Hello, Dick,” she says loudly, and looks straight up. Dick, on a gargoyle not far above her, freezes and tries to slip back into the shadows.

“I know it’s you,” she calls, and he sighs and drops down to sit next to her.

“Taking a wild guess, you’re Babs,” he says. “That hair’s hard to disguise.”

She hasn’t even noticed that her hood is blown partway off, leaving strands of bright red hair to whip around her face. “It’s a nice view,” she says, looking down at the city.

“Best in the world,” Dick says, leaning back against the glass behind him.

“Are you worried someone might catch us up here?”

“Nobody works this late except Bruce Wayne, and he’s much too busy to look for kids hanging onto the sides of his office building.”

“He’s paranoid, though.”

“How do you know?”

“Word is he designed the Wayne Industries security system himself. You’ve never seen anything with so much protection- I had to run my decryption program for _twelve hours_ before I could even start taking down the firewalls.”

“Why were you hacking into Wayne Industries?”

“Someone on the internet dared "Oracle" to send Bruce Wayne a cat video.”

_“What?”_

“And then I did it again a few weeks later for a contest to find the flaws in their security system. Got ten thousand dollars out of it, too.”

Dick suddenly glances up at the sky, where a brilliant blue beacon has suddenly lit the clouds. “That’s my cue,” he says, angling a grappling gun at the nearest rooftop. He fires and tugs the line to check its tautness before swinging away.

Barbara follows him, landing on the roof right behind him. “This was a boring night anyway,” she says with a grin, and runs past him with her hair swept behind her by the night wind. They’re jumping from roof to roof, swinging back and forth across the neon-light streets of Gotham and grappling down the glass and concrete skyscrapers with dizzying drops below their feet. They laugh and argue and shout into the wind because they can. Right before they reach the Beacon, Barbara hangs back.

“My dad’s going to be there,” she says. “I should stay back. Tell me what you find out.”

Dick nods and swings away, and after a few minutes he returns. “Joker,” he says. “He started broadcasting on all channels a few minutes ago, says he has some kind of radar disruptor that he’ll set off if the city doesn’t pay up forty million dollars. It’ll-”

“Cause planes to crash into each other. Or the city. When’s he setting it off?”

“Fifteen minutes. Don’t know where, but he’ll need to have it somewhere high up, near the center of the city-”

“The Crystal Hotel observation deck,” Barbara suggests, and Dick nods.

*****

“The elevator shaft’s rigged with explosives,” says one of the two thugs grimly. He’s a big man, not too bright- nobody with more than a few brain cells would ever consider working for the Joker after the last crew vanished and the guys before that were found with a bunch of bullets in their heads after Two-Face raided Joker’s headquarters.

He’s straightening up to go stake out the premises when twin shadows appear on the railing of the observation deck.

“Stay very quiet,” breathes the Nightwing, with an unnerving smile. The other vigilante, a girl he’s never seen before, doesn’t speak, doesn’t smile. It might be less terrifying than the Nightwing’s bright unphased grin and casual voice.

But he’s never been the brightest thug. “Boss!” he shouts before the girl kicks him in the head and he collapses in a heap. The Joker grabs a gun and bullets rattle across the rooftop, sending Nightwing and Batgirl leaping out of the way. Barbara runs along the railing, ignoring the dizzying drop below her.

Dick tackles her out of the way as bullets whistle through the air above them. “I’ll draw their fire while you disable the device,” he says, nodding towards the radar disruptor. He leaps forwards, weaving back and forth as bullets ricochet off the deck around him, and ducks behind a souvenir stand. He pops his head out and then ducks away again as the Joker grabs a gun and fires on him.

Meanwhile, Barbara slips into the small shelter provided by the elevator doors, pulling a batarang out of her utility belt. The disruptor looks solidly built, metal plating on the sides. If she can hit the rotating dish at the top of the device, or if she can access the control panel and lock it into shutdown, she might have a chance.

“Where’s the new girl?” snaps the Joker suddenly, and he turns and looks directly at Babs, eyes fever-bright and savage. He raises the gun-

“Look out!” Dick shouts, and kicks the thug chasing him solidly in the stomach. The man doubles over and Dick brings down his fists on the arch of his spine, sending him sprawling across the deck.

Barbara tumbles forwards, flipping on her hands and leaping into the air as bullets rain around her. One nicks her leg, biting through her uniform and deep into her thigh. _I thought it would hurt more,_ she thinks as she somersaults through the air and lands on the far side of the radar disruptor. The metal rings with the sounds of bullets, and the control panel explodes in a shower of sparks. Another bullet tears through the rotating dish, shattering it.

“Whoops,” says the Joker, dropping the gun onto the deck. And then Dick clubs him with the end of a pistol dropped by the thug he was fighting moments before.

“Good work,” he says brightly. “Let’s get Joker back to Arkham.”

*****

A few days later, they perch high above the city in a companionable silence. Barbara enjoys the feeling of the open air around her, the lights spread out below like tangled constellations and the moonlight turning the clouds silver. She's been working on a costume with a proper mask, maybe a cape, but it's not quite ready yet. “I’ve been meaning to ask something,” says Dick.

“What?”

“Why Batgirl?”

"What do you mean? I like bats."

"Why Bat _girl_ specifically? Why not something like Batwoman?"

"Because I'm not a woman. I'm barely into my teens. I'm a girl, still a child to pretty much everyone. And while I'm out there risking my life for the protection of everyone in this city, I don't want _any_ of them to forget that." In just a few nights as Batgirl, she’s seen dozens if not _hundreds_ of crimes. The police don’t even show up half the time, stretched thin across the city.

"Why not?"

"This world is a broken place if the grown have to rely on the young to defend them. I want them to realise that,” she says.

But after all, realizing the world is broken is the first step to fixing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen to Babs' playlist [here!](http://suan.fm/mix/MNDxiT-)


	6. Loved The Stars Too Fondly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Though my soul may set in darkness,  
> it will rise in perfect light;  
> I have loved the stars too fondly  
> to be fearful of the night.
> 
> In the dead of night, Dr Saul Erdel activates the machine meant to help him make contact with life beyond his world. The one he pulls from the surface of Mars by accident is not J'onn J'onzz.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have reached the end of the individual origin stories, just in time for the upcoming new year! And what better time for M'gann M'orzz than Hogmanay night, since her story is almost always about new beginnings? (Well, Easter, I suppose, but that was three quarters of a year ago so kinda missed _that_ date for posting :p)
> 
> Title & excerpt this time around are from _The Old Astronomer_ by Sarah Williams!

She loves the stars.

She doesn’t get to see them very often, since they and the sky they rest in are only visible from the surface, where there is seldom reason to go. And sometimes, even when on the surface, the sky is murky and cloudy and the stars are hidden.

But whenever the time is _just_ right, when the sky is clear and she’s on the surface, the beauty of a clear night sky always takes her breath away. The stars glitter and dance against the cool black of the night sky and speak of worlds beyond what is known.

Tonight is the clearest and most beautiful that she has ever seen it. Not only are all the stars bright and sparkling and stretched across the sky, but she can even see both of the moons, the smaller one sparkling as though a star itself.

She can even see the one especially bright star that she knows isn’t actually a star. It’s a Per’elandra, their nearest neighbour planet, with its large blue oceans and abundant green plants and so many kinds of _life._ Life that includes _people_ , their nearest sentient neighbours, who are maybe looking up at the stars like she is and feeling the same wonder.

She’s always wondered why it is that they’ve never made contact with each other. Whenever she asks, she’s just told that there have been proposals but they’ve never gone anywhere. She’s asked if there have been any attempts in the past, in history, but nobody ever answers her, they always redirect. A part of her wonders why Per’elandra hasn’t reached out either. Is the situation the same? Or maybe their technology isn’t strong enough yet? Or maybe they don’t even know that Maleca’andra is inhabited yet?

The distant-but-near planet is so _fascinating_ to her. She wonders what it’s like to breathe the air on their planet, what an atmosphere mostly made of nitrogen and oxygen is like, rather than one made of carbon dioxide. She wonders what it’s like to see so much water and have that be _normal_ , wonders what it’s like to see and know so _many_ varieties of plant life. She wonders what their name for their world is, what their name for _her_ world is.

She thinks that one day, she would like to go to Per’elandra and find out the answers to those questions.

The cold night’s air brushes against her skin and reminds her that the places she would like to go _one day_ are not quite so important as where she’s going to go _now._

She doesn’t really have any idea where she’s going to go. Beyond the _leaving_ part, she hasn’t really planned this whole “run away from home” thing through. Maybe she could head north or south, to one of the poles. Those’re supposed to be nicer places for white martians to live, since they’re where they came from. That _could_ just be rumours but it’s something of a plan at least.

 _How long_ , she thinks, _will it be before anyone notices I’m missing? And what will they do when they do?_

She didn’t exactly leave a note or anything. Maybe her mother would contact her Uncle J’onn. It’d make sense, given his profession.

But then, tracking down a runaway, even one that’s family, isn’t exactly a job for a _manhunter_ , so maybe not.

It feels hard to worry about these things too much when she can see the stars so clearly above her, though. There’s something calming about their presence.

She tears her eyes away from the skies and back to the red, dusty surface around her. A sigh bubbles up at the thought of having to go back into the caves to continue her journey, whatever journey it may be.

And then something tugs in her gut, something tingles across her skin, a tint of golden light starts to come over her vision. Before she can even comprehend what’s happening long enough to start panicking…

…she’s somewhere else entirely.

* * *

When the golden light falls away, she is confused and disoriented and _scared._

Her body feels too heavy and her mind feels floaty and the air feels _different_ in her lungs, it’s _different,_ _too different, she can’t_ ** _breathe-_**

She can _feel_ her lungs stuttering, trying to process this strange unknown air, can feels herself shifting instinctively, trying to figure out the composition of the air _what do I need to breathe to_ **_live_ ** and the panic has long set in by now.

She’s scared and _panicking_ and does what oh so many scared and panicking children do.

She lashes out.

She can vaguely tell that there is machinery around her, metal and glad and the hum of electricity in the air, and she reaches out with her mind and _pulls_. It bends and breaks and _shatters_. Breathing is starting to get easier, her body starting to adapt, but the panic is still set in and she pulls and pulls and _pulls_ , breaks everything around her because she’s _scared_ and she just wants it to _stop._

Something explodes.

The sudden presence of _fire_ is like a bucket of ice thrown over her. Her fear just gets _stronger_ but her strength is stripped away, her powers shut down. The chaos and destruction around her ceases.

She stumbles, slumps, feels the heat begin to make breathing tricky again and feels herself start to tremble at seeing the flame.

She can see the damage she has done too and it is _so much_ and she’s almost a little scared at what she was capable of but the fire scares her _so much more._

And then she can’t see the fire anymore because a strange-looking bipedal creature, somehow untouched by the storm of destruction it must have been surrounded by until now, has stepped in front of it, blocking it from her sight, and is now slowly approaching her. It has one limb held up, the appendage at the end held palm flat towards her, digits mostly held up, only slightly curled, which doesn’t look like a good way to shield oneself. It puts her in mind of a motion she has seen done at home, and the gentle mental push that goes with it, which is used to reassure and calm down, for a reason she isn’t sure of.

The fire is still _there_ , even if she can’t see it, and it’s still sapping at her strength. All the same, she can still sense the presence of another intelligent mind. The strange-looking bipedal creature is a _person._ An organic one, at least.

She feels her consciousness flicker and reaches for what might be her last chance. She stretched out her mind in question – _where are am what’s going on what are you who are you_ – but the heat and the flame are too much, and the darkness at the edges of her senses engulfs her before her question can be asked.

* * *

She wakes on a soft surface, lying somewhat awkwardly, with something damp dripping into her eyes. She squints at the mystery thing but can only see the fuzzy edges of it. She grabs hold of it with telekinesis and lifts it up so she can actually see it. It looks sort of like a cloth.

There is a noise from beside her and she shifts her attention. The person from before is there, emitting a lot of sounds from their mouth. It confuses her for a moment before she realises that this species must communicate audibly instead of telepathically. So the person is trying to talk to her.

That doesn’t help much if she doesn’t know the language though.

She reaches out with her mind, hoping telepathic communication will still work even if this species doesn’t use it naturally, and kind of hoping she can grab some knowledge about the language from the person’s mind.

She gets more than that. A _lot_ more than that.

Their minds snap together faster than she has almost ever experienced. The person’s mind grabs latches onto her telepathy like it was _born_ for it, for this method of communication. In an instant their questions and answers, she and his both, are laid bare, a swirl of _here is who I am here is where I’m from here is what I did and why_ swept up in a storm of images and concepts and names and places and _knowledge._

 _Oh_ says Saul Erdel, his thoughts in perfect Maleca’andran.

“Huh,” says M’gann M’orzz, her words in perfect English.

And then the cloth she had forgotten she was levitating falls back onto her head with a very loud _splat._

* * *

Dr Erdel’s home is built for humans, not for maleca’andrans ( _martians_ her newly acquired knowledge of English says), and it very poorly accommodates her long limbs and general shape.

So, she adapts. If the house is built for humans, then it just makes sense to use a humanoid form to navigate it. It’ll be much more comfortable for her if she isn’t bumping into everything around her, let alone adapting to the gravity difference on top of it. Maaleca’andran bodies were not made for Earth gravity. The extra pull is actually kind of uncomfortable.

She does so as she walks, following behind Dr Erdel as he leads her down a hallway. Figuring out the anatomy is a little tricky and she has to use telekinesis to keep herself properly upright and balanced as she walks, but by the time they reach the door at the end, she thinks she has a pretty good approximation.

Dr Erdel puts his hand on the doorknob, then pauses and looks back, clearly about to say something.

Then he stops. And stares.

For a moment, she worries that she messed up something about anatomy rather significantly – are her limbs too long? Her head the wrong shape? Is it that she made her skin green? What she saw when they were linked had seemed to indicate this was the colour humans expected aliens to be, so she had thought it would help him be a bit more comfortable as well… maybe she was wrong? Or maybe it’s that she didn’t give herself any hair? She saw hairless humans during the connection but maybe those are unusual cases or-

“You look like you’re in your twenties,” Dr Erdel says, unknowingly answering her unspoken questions. “When we-” he gestures vaguely as though along a line between their heads, lacking the terminology for the telepathic connection they made “-you didn’t… feel that old,”

She glances down at the form she has crafted, mostly humanoid with some maleca’andran features (she kept her eyes mostly the same, though not much else, and she can’t see those) and thinks, doing a mental calculation.

“In Earth years…” she starts, hoping she’s done the conversion correctly, based on what knowledge of orbits she has from home and what she’s gleaned from their mental connection “...I’m thirty two,”

“And what is that for your species?” Dr Erdel asks.

She blinks, runs the numbers around in her head again as best she can. She has a feeling the question is meant to have a specific meaning where the answer isn’t what she just said, but she can’t figure out what it is.

Dr Erdel seems to notice.

“I mean, if you were a human-” he gestures briefly to himself as though to clarify what a human is “-what age would you be?”

She thinks it over, pouring over what knowledge of humanity she has, what knowledge of her own people she has, and eventually comes up with a rough estimate.

“About… ten and a half,” she says.

Dr Erdel’s hold on the door handle tightens. He takes a deep breath in, and then out.

“I see,” he says, an emotion that she can’t identify in his voice.

And then he opens the door.

* * *

The room beyond the door is the lab in which she was teleported to Earth, and it lies in tatters.

Dr Erdel steps aside and she walks in past him. The walls and floor have many scorch marks from the flames, the machinery that was within is strewn across the room in hunks, with shattered glass glittering across the surfaces.

“I was trying to build a communications device,” Dr Erdel says, his voice heavy, looking more at the floor than the room “Trying to make something revolutionary, to bring me fame and fortune. But also to reach out to the stars, to find the answer to the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’” He puts his hands in his pockets, huffs out a sound halfway between a wry chuckle and a sigh “Guess I succeeded at _that_ part, huh?”

She makes a small humming sound, neither confirmation nor denial, her attention drawn elsewhere.

There is one bit of machinery, lying on the floor in the near middle of the room, that seems… familiar, for a reason she can’t place just yet. She hovers over to it carefully, avoiding walking on the glass, and picks it up, turning it over, examining it. And then realisation slams into her, and she almost drops it.

“Where did you get this?” she asks.

“I found it,” he answers. “It was part of what inspired me to build this thing in the first place. It didn’t look like anything on Earth I had ever seen,”

There are other part like the one in her hands strewn around the room. She knows why it’s familiar, knows why they’re all familiar, knows why they look like nothing else on Earth.

“This is Maleca’andran,” she says, her voice quiet. “It’s part of a teleporter,”

If Maleca’andran technology is here, then logically the people who built it were here as well. Her people have _been_ to Per’eldanra before. This is _proof._

She wonders why her questions about this topic were always avoided. She wonders what _happened_ here, on this planet, with her people.

“A teleporter,” he repeats, and she can _feel_ his guilt, strong enough that he’s projecting it unintentionally. “So that’s why-”

“-I got pulled here,” she finishes for him, moving back from her position to a place where the floor is clear and setting down, still holding the piece of the teleporter.

Dr Erdel steps forward and puts a hand on her shoulder, in a gesture she now knows is a human sign of comfort.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice tight “but I… I can’t send you home,”

Given the state of the room, she’s not surprised.

“I was running away anyways,” she says, not turning to look at him, thinking of the red sandy plains and the deep running caves and the thought _someday I would like to go to Per’elandra_. “You just… helped me run really far,”

“Let me at least help you adjust to life on Earth,” he says “It’s the least I can do for pulling you so far away from home,”

Her grip on the teleporter piece tightens and she nods, once, sharply.

* * *

Learning how to live on Earth, she discovers, involves a lot of reading books and watching television.

She doesn’t particularly mind. Books are fascinating. Dr Erdel has a lot of ones about science. Television is fun, a form of entertainment and storytelling that they don’t have on Maleca’andra. Dr Erdel seems to favour documentaries and murder mysteries, but she far prefers the sitcoms.

“Nobody _actually_ acts like that,” he complains, despite the fact that he’s the one that chose to pay attention to the show and not the pulp magazine he had been reading. And then, in response to a laugh track “That _wasn’t even funny,”_

“Ssshhhhh,” she replies, eyes glued to the screen. Absently, she reaches for another Choco cookie from the box next to her, briefly underestimating her range with the shorter arms she has now, both from being a humanoid and from taking on a form closer to a human at her equivalent age.

“You have an addiction,” Dr Erdel says “To sitcoms _and_ to Chocos. That’s your third box today. I never should have introduced you to either of these things,”

“ _Ssshhhhh,”_ she replies.

* * *

It isn’t just television and books though. They take occasional trips into town (“This’ll at least give you an idea of what _real people_ act like,” Dr Erdel says, still grumbling about the sitcoms he’s gotten stuck watching with her) and M’gann shifts her humanoid form to a fully human one. She gives herself long, red hair the first time, the colour reminds her of home, and likes the feel of it so much that she keeps it when she shifts back to her ‘martian’ form later.

They need a reason for her to be around, of course, so they say that she’s a distant niece, staying for the summer. Dr Erdel is apparently known to be a bit eccentric and nobody bats an eye at any odd behaviours ‘Megan’ displays.

“The ‘niece’ excuse is going to stop working when summer ends,” he tells her after their third trip, while she stares out at the plants rushing by outside the car window, lost in thought.

“I know,” she says, resting her elbow against the door and her head in her head “That’s okay, I’m thinking of leaving anyways. I want to see the rest of Per’elandr- the rest of _Earth,_ ”

“Megan, you’re just a _child,_ ” Dr Erdel says, sounding like he wants to take his eyes off the road to look at her “Not to mention, you know, being an _alien._ That would be _far_ too dangerous,”

“I’m a child who can fly, turn invisible, and shapeshift into any form I want to. Hiding would be _easy,_ ” she says, looking up from the trees to the clouds drifting by in the blue, blue sky “and I have telekinesis and telepathy, so I could easily protect myself, if hiding didn’t work,”

She hears Dr Erdel sigh slightly, and they drive on in silence for a few moments before she speaks up again.

“Also I can walk through walls,”

“You _cannot,”_

“ _Can too,”_

“No, you _can’t,”_

“...okay, fine, I can’t. I don’t know how to density shift,” there is a pause, and then a quiet, petulant “not _yet_ anyway,”

Dr Erdel laughs and she smiles a little despite herself.

* * *

Regardless of whatever protests Dr Erdel still has after many, many discussions on the issue, M’gann still leaves at the end of the summer.

“I guess I really can’t stop you, can I?” he says, standing in the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, in the early hours of the morning of the first day of Autumn. His posture is as casual as can be but she can feel the concern radiating from his mind.

“There’s a _really big_ world out there,” she says, spinning on her heel to face him, hooking her hands through the straps of the rucksack full of supplies she’s taking with her “and I want to see _all of it,”_

“Take care, M’gann,” he says, his casual posture starting to crack and reveal worry “there’s a lot of danger out there,”

“Sure there is,” she says, grinning the most innocent grin she has “but probably none of it will be more dangerous than _me,”_

He laughs a little despite himself, looking for all the world the doting uncle they’ve been pretending he is for the past three months.

“Come back to visit sometime, kid,” he says.

“Of course I will!” she replies.

The world falls silent but for the sounds of wildlife and wind rustling through leaves, but only for a moment.

“Goodbye, Dr Erdel,” M’gann says, meeting his eyes and smiling softly.

“Goodbye, M’gann,” he says, meeting hers and smiling in return.

She waits until he steps back inside and shuts the door, and then she allows herself to slip into invisibility and take to the air.

An image of the broken teleporter piece flashes through her mind.

There’s a really big world out there and she wants to see it all. There’s a really big world out there and there’s Martian technology hiding in it somewhere. There’s a really big world out there and her people have been here before and _nobody ever talks about it._

She wants to know more. And the only way she’s going to do that is by _looking._

* * *

She travels and sees everything she can and _looks_ everywhere she can. She tracks down every scrap of evidence of Malaca’andran presence that she can find and learns so many, many news things about Earth, meets so many people in so many places.

She knows the importance of staying hidden, staying unknown, and she uses a different face in almost every place, does what she can to make herself impossible to track, even if nobody is tracking her in the first place.

Even so, she can’t keep herself from helping people when she sees situations where she _can_ help.

A builder falls from scaffolding and a mysterious force catches them midair. A mysterious stranger tackles a bank robber, slowing them down just long enough to be caught by the police. A mugger abruptly finds that mugging someone is rather difficult when your trousers have decided to keep your socks company and your shirt sleeves have stretched and tied themselves into knots.

Nobody ever makes the connection between these events and the presence of the young, wandering stranger (usually an adult, adults are questioned about travel less, it’s easier) who arrived in town a few mornings back and will be gone by the next nightfall.

She keeps moving anyways, just to be safe.

There’s a part of her that sort of wishes that people could _know_ she was the one helping, wishes she didn’t have to do it all… cloak and dagger (she thinks that’s the right use of the phrase) and she tells herself that maybe, just maybe, if the day ever comes that someone else shows up and does things like she does, starts paving a path for this sort of thing, she’ll stop hiding so much and join them.

She doesn’t quite feel up to starting the path herself.

* * *

Stories about the mysterious Wonder Girl start spreading, whispers of the mysterious Gotham Vigilante start whirling, people start looking at tales of the incredible and unknown and thinking _maybe, maybe, maybe…_

…and she does nothing.

It feels too early, she doesn’t feel ready, she stays back and hides in the shadows and helps from there and keeps looking for further traces of Maleca’andra on Earth’s surface. She doesn’t even know if any of these faintly heard stories are _true._

And then they start spreading further and louder, new figures joining the fray with stories of _Supergirl_ and _Flash_ and _the Nightwing_ who takes the place of the Gotham Vigilante.

And she still doesn’t do anything.

This time, though, because she doesn’t hear any of it.

She’s sort of holed herself up in the Australian outback when _those_ stories start spreading.

(She’s homesick, is the honest truth of the matter. It has been six years and she hasn’t seen any member of her own species, has found only the barest traces of their _once upon a time_ presence on this planet, hasn’t share a connection with another telepathic mind, hasn’t had _any_ of what she’s used to.

She does love being on Earth, feels like she’s meant to be here, meant to do something here, meant to _belong_ here, but sometimes (a lot of time) she just misses Maleca’andra. She just misses _home._

Australia is the closest thing to that that she’s found on this planet, so she holes herself up in the outback, among hills and red sands and rocks, and stares up at the stars on nights of the new moon and imagines she’s back home on Maleca’andra. These nights it feels like she can forget the loneliness and the sadness growing up there, and just remember the good, happy times with her family. It feels like she can miss it, without a need to go back, if she has something just similar enough.

It doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does. And sometimes sometimes is enough.

She can’t keep herself isolated for too long, the lack of other minds, even non-telepathic ones, starts to get to her, so she pulls herself out of the outback a few times, but she doesn’t really head back into civilisation for a while. She tracks down evidence of malaca’andran presence on her own, because too many leads have been false. (when she heard the multitude of stories around places supposedly built with help from other worlds, places like Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt, she had been eager to check them out. They had been stunning, breathtaking places, but there was no doubt in her mind that it was all human architecture) She sticks to quite, remote places, where she can let herself be a little more herself without the risk of being spotted.

And when she starts to feel the long for home again, she dashes back to red sands and rocks that are almost close enough.)

(When she finally puts herself back in contact with civilisation again, she finds out how long heroes have been active, and almost wants to kick herself)

* * *

The next year or so is a year of many costumes and attempts at a hero identity, a search to find the one that’s _just right._ None of the costumes really last past one or two appearances and she’s still helping people in small ways, not big fights, and she can’t think of a _name_ to go with any of them.

She doesn’t quite make headlines like Supergirl or the Nightwing or Batgirl or Wondergirl or the Flash, but there are a few small town newspapers that make mention of her. None of them give her a name, which is a pain, because that’s how Supergirl and Wonder girl got _their_ names and she was sort of hoping she could do the same thing. It would’ve been really helpful if someone else came up with a name _for_ her.

Nonetheless, stories about a green skinned girl who flies and moves things without touching them and fades in and out of sight start to spread.

It feels nice to be acknowledged as the one helping people. It’s not quite as nice as actually helping people, but it’s still nice.

She reads the stories about her that show up sometimes. There’s a lot of speculation and a lot of it makes her laugh. There seems to be a general consensus that she’s an alien and that’s where the agreement ends. It’s a little frustrating that they all come up with so many speculations about things like how she stays hidden or what she’s doing when she’s not helping people, but none of them bother to give her a _name._

Despite that, though, nobody really seems to pick up on the shapeshifting, so she decides she should probably keep it under wraps for as long as she can. It’ll probably be a useful surprise someday.

* * *

When inspiration finally hits her, she’s back at Saul Erdel’s, the place that it all began.

He’s watching some tv adaptation of an old pulp magazine that he likes and she’s sitting through it with him because she made him watch _so many_ sitcoms, so it’s the least she can do. She isn’t really paying that much attention, but then someone - maybe the main character, maybe some side character, she honestly doesn’t know who anyone in this show is - says a word, and her brain repeats it in malaca’andran and she sits up ramrod as inspiration _strikes._

She dashes off without an explanation, a costume to go with the name already forming in her thoughts, and just shoots off a terse _had an idea_ when she feels Dr Erdel clumisly broadcast a question.

A few hours later, the program well and truly over by that point, she flies back into the room, does a mid-air twirl that’s half a flip to show of her cape as she goes, and grins.

“What do you think?” she asks, coming to a stop.

Dr Erdel looks the costume up and down, seems to think it over, and then says-

“Are you wearing a t-shirt?”

“Well… yeah,” she glances down at the deep gray shirt and the bright red cross she’s emblazoned on it, and then crosses her legs mid-air, tucking them up underneath her, and looks back to Dr Erdel “That was my idea, combining clothing from here with stuff from home,”

“Specific stuff?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“A uniform,” she says “what I remember of it from seeing my Uncle occasionally, anyway,”

“Your uncle, the-” he starts to say

“Yep!” she interrupts. “My uncle the manhunter, because _I-”_

She uncrosses her legs and strikes a pose.

“-am the Martian Manhunter!”

* * *

The Martian Manhunter makes her first true public debut three days later.

And, as is wont to happen with heroes, the stories spread quickly. It helps that these are stories that have been circulating for a long time, and have just now given concrete information to work with.

They say that the Martian Manhunter arrived out of the sky like just arriving from space, with hair flying like flame upon reentry, a cape stark white like the stars on the outside, and crimson red like her planet on the inside. They say that the cross on her front is the symbol of great heroes on her homeworld and that she came all the way from Earth’s nearest neighbour to spread that same heroism. They say she can fly and move things without touching them, can read minds and talk to people through them, and she’s as strong as Supergirl, if not as invulnerable.

In their own way, none of these things are untrue.

The things that they don’t say, because they don’t know them, is that before she came from the sky to save the day, she was the young girl among the crowds in danger that vanished when nobody was looking at her. What they don’t say is that she’s been around for many years already, doing things quietly (though some read old stories of mysterious savings and glimpses of a green skinned girl saving lives, and realise).

What they don’t say is that even though she is one now, she didn’t come to be a hero - she didn’t mean to come at all.

But no matter the things that people do and do not know, do and do not say, the Martian Manhunter is on Earth, and she’s pretty sure she’s here to stay.

* * *

Half a year after she makes her public debut, the Appelexians arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand, that's the end! I hope you've enjoyed this universe so far and will stick around to see more of it when we act on that last line and begin the origin of the Justice League!
> 
> I took most of my inspiration for M'gann from the Young Justice cartoon, as that's the version of her I'm most familiar with, but I also tried to weave in factors of her comics counterpart. The end result was a M'gann who took on a life of her own, and I've grown quite fond of her. Let me know what you think?
> 
> M'gann's playlist is [here!](http://suan.fm/mix/VkJHX6W)


End file.
